Customer churn is a huge issue for many businesses. Sixty-one percent of businesses revealed that it’s their top marketing challenge, according to HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound report. It has become a major priority in sales and marketing in the last three years.
What is churn? It’s the decrease of customers that stop using your company’s products and services within a certain time period. You can get your churn rate by diving the customers you lost by the number of customers you had in the beginning.
The reasons for churn are tailored to each business. Fortunately, there are several ways to decrease churn and keep it down.
1. Close the Right Customers
Before you implement your success software, you need to ensure that you’re closing the right customers. The key to using this software is to take a closer look at your customer acquisition strategy. Ask yourself the following questions:
Are you targeting the right customers?
Are you using the right channels?
Are you delivering the right results?
It’s also important to determine if your business is aligned with your target audience. This involves your customer support, marketing, and sales departments. It’s similar to finding the right type of customer.
If your marketing team isn’t working with your sales team, then you’ll experience an increase in churn. Take a good look at your acquisition strategy and notice that you’re targeting the wrong customers. Bring your teams together to create a high-fit buyer personal that tweaks your customer acquisition strategy.
By creating these buyer personas, you’ll ensure that you’re targeting the right customers. That should help you improve the customer experience and retain the right customers for your brand.
2. Consider the Price of Your Products & Services
Price is one reason for churn. It can also affect your customer success and sales department. If your customers find an affordable alternative, then they’re likely to leave your company. You need to focus on customer onboarding, education, and value so the right customers will feel that your products and services are worth the investment.
3. Solve Problems for Your Customers
Once you’ve determined your buyer personas, customer acquisition strategy, and pricing, you need to make sure that your success team and software is working properly. Rude staff and slow service are of the two biggest factors for churn, according to the Customer Experience Impact Report released by Oracle.
Your organization’s main focus should be solving problems for your customers. But if solving those problems takes more time, money, and effort than you anticipated, then you’ll have an issue with customer satisfaction.
A service-level agreement is one way to fix this problem. You should create one for each of your customers. Regularly review the expectations and goals you both set, and tweak them as necessary.
4. Take a Close Look at Your Products & Marketing
Poor marketing techniques and products is another reason for customer churn. It can negatively impact the performance of your customer support and sales teams. If your sales team is struggling to hit their goals and aren’t finding the right customers, the result is increased churn within a few months of purchase.
Customers may realize that they can’t afford your products or services. Or, may your solutions don’t help them achieve their goals.
5. Measure Your Customer Success Team
Your main focus should be to monitor your success team based on their success. If you don’t focus on this key component, then your customer happiness will decrease.
By monitoring your success and services through customer satisfaction surveys, feedback, and success software, you can ensure that your team is focused on your customer’s needs. When your customers are happy, they are more likely to stick with your business.
It doesn’t matter which challenges or problems they might come across. They already made the decision to become dedicated customers.
6. Increase the User Experience
If the User Experience of your mobile applications and website is glitchy, buggy, or difficult to use, then they’ll switch to one of your competitors. They’re also less likely to use your services, decreasing the chances of them sticking around.
Customer churn is an all too common problem. But when you have money on the line, you can try to reduce it as much as possible.
Using each of these steps to improve the customer experience can help you decrease churn and maintain it. When churn happens, the one thing you should focus on is providing value to your customers. If you can add benefits to your products and services, then your customers will turn into long-term customers.