What Is Customer Churn Management?
Customers can be fickle; they need reasons to stay loyal to their preferred brands or to be brought back if they stray. When a customer leaves a business or brand, we say that the customer has churned. Customer churn is a huge problem for any business because the business needs to acquire a new customer just to stay in the same place.
The best way to address problems is by working to prevent them from happening in the first place. Being proactive may not eliminate issues entirely, but it will likely reduce their frequency. This brings us to the topic of customer churn management, named because doing away with it altogether is impossible.
Customer churn management starts with a simple question: do you know what the monthly or annual churn rate among your customers is?
You should have these figures. Because having them implies you also have some form of customer retention strategy. These numbers are, or should be, as critical a KPI as any other operational success metric. A high churn rate is the mark of organizational instability. Left unaddressed, it will cause severe problems.
The First Step in Managing Customer Churn
If you need a reason to take churn seriously, then follow the money. This is an illuminating path to follow. Churn is not solely about lost revenue; there is also the greater expense of acquiring new customers to replace the ones that got away. Between those two points is the further loss of potential new revenue from upselling and cross-sales to existing consumers. The total loss justifies any investment put into prevention.
To get a handle on customer churn in your business, start with the low-hanging fruit: is the number of customers leaving greater than the new revenue being generated? Money in must be greater than money out; this is a basic economic policy principle.
How to Stop (or Minimize) Customer Churn
Once the question about churn rate has been resolved, turn over these rocks:
- Review the customer support queue: this should be a staple of your quality function anyway, but this application provides a close-up look at the issues customers face. If there are abundant questions about basic product features, that’s a red flag. It means customers have not fully implemented your product and are unaware of the features that marked your value proposition, and their frustration will impact retention. Contact them. Proactively. Immediately, if not sooner. Little things have a habit of becoming big things, but little issues are also the easiest to correct.
- Browse your online community or relevant boards: bad news and discontent travel faster and farther than light and happiness. Someone who is struggling and telling others about it poses a potential exponential risk to the business. Make contact now and offer a personalized solution to whatever they are struggling with. Put the ‘care’ in customer care, even if it means dedicating a few support agents. Their time will be well spent. At worst, you’ll retain customers. At best, those users will become loyalists and advocates.
- Examine user billing data: this information speaks volumes about average customer revenue, lifetime value, and upgrades/downgrades if yours is a subscription model. Any downgrades fall into the ‘contact now’ category, just like the examples above. For some reason, these users have not realized the full value of what they bought. Help them. Or someone else will.
Tools like satisfaction surveys, net promoter scores, and customer outreach calls are there to be used. Getting sidetracked with working to grow a business and land new customers is easy. Many companies do it. The ones that survive, however, also look inward at preserving their growth by identifying who is or might be at risk of leaving. While you can’t stop every customer from leaving, you can minimize that number by employing these simple techniques.
Know Your Customer to Reduce Churn
We are in a time when people have more access to more information at a more convenient level than ever before. Data-based decision-making, or analytics, is evident in everything from manufacturing to banking to sports to education and so forth. Data is obviously helpful for uncovering trends and opportunities, but it also highlights your best customers and their behaviors. When you know what a happy, loyal customer looks like, it becomes easier to decide how to handle product users who are on the fence.
Before you think this sounds obvious, consider that about two-thirds of businesses expect churn rates to go up. That’s right; 64% of companies surveyed anticipate more churn rather than less, and more than 96% think that cancelations happen for reasons that are not that hard to fix, such as:
- Product issues
- Inconsistent service
- Inadequate onboarding
Each of those concerns is solvable, often by diving into the process flow of the customer journey. Put yourself in the product user’s shoes; see what that person sees. Points of friction should become evident, which opens the door to proactive solutions.
Proactivity is a critical aspect of high-quality customer support, reliant on recognizing potential issues or anticipating them, and then getting ahead of the curve. This approach reduces ticket volume, user frustration, and ultimately, customer churn.
Managing Churn Is Time Well Spent
Not that the point needs to be made, but reducing churn and improving retention is a revenue multiplier – happy customers spend more, you’re not pouring resources into making up shortfalls, and you have a loyal user base that can be a source of referrals. Just as people will be vocal about products and service that let them down, they will be just as enthusiastic about experiences of excellence.
This doesn’t mean that you will retain every customer. Human nature will not allow for that, and not everyone leaves because you did something wrong. But the information is there for discovering why some customers are considering a change. Use the data, drill into it, and then act. Give people reasons to stay, and they will likely do just that.
