How to Prevent Customer Churn with Excellent Customer Service

It is often said that acquiring new customers is much easier than retaining them. The customer churn rate is described as the percentage of subscribers who choose to discontinue their subscription within a given time frame. According to Acquire.io, the main reasons for high churn out rate are customers feeling less cared for; service dissatisfaction and external competition.

One study established that up to 50% of all customers will leave a company naturally after a 5 year stint. Lower churn rate is good for the growth and performance of business because the success of any business depends heavily on returning customers. According to UserIQ, the 8 best industry practices, SaaS companies can assume to prevent high customer churn rate include:

1. Avoid overselling

Some aspects of subscription based business model is far removed from those of the organizational setup. For instance, users in subscription based businesses are free to leave whenever they want. Secondly, deal closing is much easier under the organizational setup. To overcome the disparity, subscription businesses must learn how to manage expectations; put more effort in marketing their products and ensure their customer success teams are properly aligned.

2. Exhibit product value quick enough

Users will always rush to know what’s in for them, when it comes to product value. For example, users of B2B SaaS applications are mostly professionals seeking immediate or instant results. To satisfy this market, you must get them up to speed with any product development or changes that may drive a wedge if not handled well.

3. Offer relevant case studies

If your customers are not using your product or service as intended, take the time to show them success stories of accounts similar to their own. You can also use the opportunity to discuss the product functionality and features that work concertedly or seamlessly together.

4. Bring your application users back

If the users of your application have left, simply work out strategies to bring them back. Distraction from other players may be the reason why users are quitting. One effective bounce back strategy is inviting the users to try the old products once again. The customer success consultant should always be on stand-by to offer much needed assistance.

5. Set the right pricing tiers

Even if your application promises value, a reason to justify the cost must be clear in the customer’s conscience. To compound the situation, customers will always scrutinize the competition, viz a viz what you are offering and analyze the functions in the other company subscriptions, including the free tier offering before making a jump.

6. Do not overuse feedback tools and satisfaction surveys

Although feedback tolls and satisfaction surveys are crucial in preventing churn, they should be used sparingly to avoid user experience conflicts. If these tools must be used, they should provide a convenient platform for users to learn and share ideas. In the same breadth, an option should be provided to allow users to skip the surveys altogether.

7. Use SaaS dashboards

The dashboard is designed to help businesses track how users are utilizing the applications. The high level tool also helps inform business managers about the risk of churn; increments in customer complaints and drill downs that can be used to detect bugs.

8. Understand why users are leaving

Understanding the reasons why customers are leaving will help you avoid costly repetitions. If you want to get to the bottom of the issues, the company can institute a post mortem or administer exit interviews with customers to reveal the areas of weakness. Common hiccups such as bad-fit segment can be addressed by crafting a plan of action that addresses the placement.

UserIQ Churn Solutions

UserIQ is on a mission to help client firms deliver better value to customers. Since its establishment in 2014, UserIQ has been assisting business scale onboarding efforts, accelerate time to value, drive revenue streams and increase feature usage. If implemented, these efforts will go a long way to guarantee excellent customer experience, faster adoption, healthier retention and high growth rates. Companies also need to stay proactive in order to stem the costly customer churn tide.

The UserIQ churn solutions cover short term, mid-term and long term churn. The most popular UserIQ tools for preventing churn and promoting informed actions include: analytics and testing tools, support and user engagement tools, customer feedback and financial and billing tools. Effective analytics and testing tools include userIQ, Appcues and Churnzero. UserIQ offers high level, segmented views of products. The tool can also aptly predict the churn before it happens.

Churnzero, on the other hand, can track customer engagement across vast segments based on product iteration. Support and user engagement tools, offer vital lessons and guidance about a product. For instance, the event based, customer.io tool can be used to trigger emails that may drive churn. This listing includes users whose trial subscription is ending. MailChimp on its part can help create multiple mailing lists for various segments and convince subscribers to stay on.

Customer feedback applications are valuable, especially when you want to engage users in conversation. The tools can also be used to gather crucial information and opinions. A tech stack will be incomplete without mentioning financial and billings. This series of tools connect applications to financial performance. Examples of UserIQ financial and billing tools include; FirstOfficer, Churn Buster and Stunning. The FirstOfficer monitors stripe payments using metrics like cohorts and recurring revenue.

 

Author Bio: Adrian Rubin is a freelance writer and Philly photographer.