Customer Churn. You probably have found that it is easier getting new customers than retaining them. However, the more customers you are able to retain, the more your business prospers. Every business loses customers, but you can implement several strategies that will be key in eliminating customer churn.
High customer churn can devastate a business after a certain point. A thriving and successful business becomes this way when it not only attracts new customers but retains old ones. Getting new customers can be difficult, which is why you want to reduce customer churn. What’s more is that it is expensive to keep attracting new customers; whereas existing customers can actually become ambassadors for your brand and help you attract new customers with little work on your part.
What Is Customer Churn?
What exactly is customer churn? It is the rate measured at which existing customers stop buying your products and services. To calculate your customer churn rate, you should take the number of customers you lost in a given period of time and divide it by your total current number of customers.
When your customers are unhappy with the service they are getting from your business, they will take their money elsewhere. If there is an underlying theme as to why you are experiencing customer churn, you are going to want to investigate the reasons, as well as what you can do to reduce the churn.
This is a critical metric for a business, since it helps determine its level of success. The higher the customer churn in your business, the more your business will be negatively impacted. Sure, you can do plenty to reduce customer churn, but you will never be able to eliminate it entirely. You want to at least be at a place where your customer churn rate is lower than your customer acquisition rate.
Sometimes, there are forces outside of your control taking away your customers. However, for the most part, you will have the ability to eliminate most customer churn when you follow our tips and guide.
How to Eliminate Customer Churn?
There are several things you can do right now to reduce and eliminate customer churn. Here are 11 that we are going to focus on. Incorporate one, or several, of these and watch your customer retention rates skyrocket.
1. Identify Why Churn Is Occurring
The first step to getting rid of customer churn is to find out why it is occurring in the first place. You need to communicate and talk with your customers to get insight into how they are feeling about the customer service experience you are providing. Send them a survey, ask a question on social media, engage with them in a live chat, or even get them on the phone. If there is a way for you to talk to your customers, you can use it as a way to find out what they think about how you are doing. If they already left, ask them what the reason was.
Analyzing customer churn can help you put together trends, which have the ability to forecast churn before it happens. You can then identify and reach out to customers who are at risk of leaving and offer them incentives to stay.
2. Communicate With Your Existing Customers Regularly
Avoid the situation of churn in the first place by providing excellent customer support and regular engagement with them. You should be providing reasons for them to keep coming back to your business and buying more of your products and services. These hooks can be things like showing off all the benefits of your product or service, providing regular updates, giving out special deals, making announcements about something new that happened, or content on another way your product or service can be beneficial to them.
Another form of communicating with your customers is listening to what they are saying about your business. Look on search engines and social media for any mentions of your business or brand. Perform a temperature check on whether the feedback is positive or negative. You will always be at the forefront of what customers are thinking about your business when you take these steps.
3. Ask for Feedback
Tying into the previous tip, you should actively be asking your customers for feedback on their experience with your product or service. You can send your customers a feedback survey to find out whether they are confused or frustrated about some aspect of what you are selling. These surveys will help you identify any specific issues customers may be having, which helps avoid losing other customers.
Surveys show that you actually care about what your customers think. Identify the roadblocks that are common among your customers, so you can then rectify them and create a more seamless user experience.
4. Be Proactive
You want to make sure that the user experience is the best and easiest it can be. One great way of doing this is to have a live chat engage with a customer on your website or app at certain points. Another way is to send them a special email based on the type of behavior they are exhibiting on your website or app. The benefit of proactive service and support is that your customers will get immediate help. This gives them a better experience and helps them stick with you for longer.
5. Offer Incentives
People love a good deal, or at least the perception of one. Provide discounts, loyalty programs, and special offers to customers your research has indicated are the most likely to move on. In order to do this in a cost-effective way, you need to make sure that the customers you identified are likely to take you up on your offer. You should avoid trying to retain customers who have made it evident and clear that they have had their minds made up.
You want to give customers a reason to stick with your brand. This small gesture can go a long way to show your customers that you appreciate them. You want to time these incentives so that they appear to the customer at a critical moment, such as when they are indicating they will be moving on. You may not get rid of all customer churn using this tactic, but you will definitely retain some customers that would have otherwise moved on.
6. Create a Community Around Your Products or Services
Humans are relational beings that like feeling like they are part of a tribe. This is why creating a community that is focused around your products or services is an effective way to retain your customers. Make your customers feel like they are a part of your brand. They can become so identified with your brand that they will end up being ambassadors for it on their own, netting you more customers.
Your community should be designed in a way where it can engage and educate customers on your business and brand. Whatever you do, make sure that you are placing it in the forefront whenever you can. This is a very popular way of retaining customers and eliminating customer churn.
7. Target the Right Audience
You can be pulling out all the tricks to retain customers, but if those customers are coming for the wrong reasons, you will not be able to do anything to retain them. For example, if you are attracting customers who are hooked by getting something for free or for practically nothing, these people may not be likely to want something of greater value that you have to offer. Freebie collectors will probably grab whatever it is that you are giving away for free and then move on. To reduce customer churn, start by attracting the right audience in the first place. Target people who like to invest in good quality rather than a cheap price.
8. Carefully Consider Any Complaints
When a customer complains about a specific product or service, or if they complain about your brand altogether, it is a cause for reflection. Complaints are indicators that there may be deeper and more underlying issues with how you are conducting business. They can reveal problems with how you are providing customer service and support. You should always carefully consider any complaints customers voice about what you are selling or doing.
Another reason why you should listen to the vocal minority is because a majority of customers will not voice their complaints. They will simply leave and not give your business any more money. Even a single negative experience a customer has can deter a significant amount of customers to stop supporting a brand. Anytime you receive some sort of complaint, you should take it seriously and address it. You may even turn a dissatisfied customer into an advocate for your brand, given how you went the extra mile to ensure their grievances are address.
9. Emphasize Your Competitive Advantages
To get rid of customer churn, you are going to need to stand out from the crowd in your niche. Is there something you do differently than your competitors? Is there something that your customers will lose out on if they leave and go somewhere else? When you have a competitive edge on the rest of the businesses in your niche, you have a greater likelihood of retaining them and preventing customer churn. Why would a customer go somewhere else if you are the only place that has some unique aspect to something others are doing? They won’t want to leave.
10. Make Customer Onboarding Easy
When you get a new customer, you want to make things as easy and simple as possible for them. The last thing you want is for them to get overwhelmed or confused. They should have an easy time navigating your product or service. If they don’t, they may get frustrated and make a quick exit.
You can help your new customers transition to your product or service by developing an onboarding process. This will be a protocol you initiate to guide new customers through all the functions, features, and processes of using a product or service you have. When you guide your new customers, you will get to empower them to feel like they can easily succeed and get a handle on whatever it is that your are selling. The onboarding process also helps you identify potential snags other customers could run into, which will further help your goal in increasing customer retention and eliminating customer churn.
11. Personalize the User Experience
People like when they get personalized treatment. These days, the bar has been set higher than ever before when it comes to user experience. People expect products and services to be tailored to their unique needs and wants. You need to go in and connect with your customers on a personal level. This will help you retain them for longer, since they feel like you value their desire to have a personalized experience with your brand.
Ideally, you want to be able to figure out how to personalize your customers’ experience better than they would even know is possible. You should be able to tell them what they need to know before they realize it.
Wrapping Up
Customer churn is an inevitable part of business. However, there are several ways in which you can reduce the churn rate and make your business more profitable. You can try out the tips and strategies laid out above, or you can reach out to CommBox in order to enhance your entire customer journey that will eventually reduce churn drastically.
With CommBox, you will be able to automate certain aspects of your business, which will satisfy your customers’ needs and wants. Good customer support is one of the best ways of eliminating customer churn, which is something we are proud of doing for long time. With the power of novel technologies, such as Chatbots, SMS, WhatsApp, and other automated systems, retaining customers and eliminating customer churn has never been easier.
