10 Tips to Reduce Customer Churn

如果您正在处理流失问题，那么您并不孤单。

According toHubSpot's 2021 State of Inbound report, over 50% of companies note that generating leads and increasing customer satisfaction are a top marketing priority in the next year, which has stayed consistent over the last several years.

Now, I'm no mind reader, but I'm willing to bet that the struggle to generate new demand for a business can be easily tied back to the struggle to保持现有客户.

And while reducing churn sounds like a big undertaking, it's one that's definitely worth prioritizing: A 5% increase in客户保留can increase profits by 25% to 95%,according to research from Bain & Company.

We'll walk through a few strategies for reducing churn below. But first, let's start by defining the term to establish some common ground.

Table of Contents

• 客户流失

• Customer Attrition Analysis

• Types of Customer Churn

• How to Identify Customer Churn

• How to Reduce Customer Churn

Customer churn -- also known as customer attrition -- refers to the rate at which customers who purchase or subscribe to your product or service offering end their relationship with you and stop bringing in revenue for your business.

Let's say, for example, that you started the quarter with 500 customers and lost 25. That would leave you with a churn rate of 5%.

In most cases, this number is noted as a percentage, but as Nadav Dakner of InboundJunction suggests you should state the number in a way that makes the most sense for your business.

在他的Kissmetrics文章中，Dakner notes the following as alternative ways to demonstrate customer churn:

• Number of customers lost
• 丢失的客户百分比
• Value of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) lost
• Percentage of MRR loss

Customer Attrition Analysis

Causes of Customer Churn

Reasons for customer churncan be personal and unique to each customer, but they usually fall under a few common categories:

Price

Price is a common objection for salespeople and customer success managers alike. If customers find a more cost-effective solution to the problem they want to solve, they may churn. This is why it's important to establish value and customer onboarding and education so customers feel that the purchase is worth the cost.

产品/市场合身

Poor product/market fit is a common reason for customer churn and speaks to the need for close sales and customer service alignment. If salespeople are hustling to hit quota and aren't incentivized to sell to good-fit customers, the result will be churn within a few months of purchase when the customer realized they can't achieve their goals using your solution.

用户体验

If the user experience with software or applications is buggy, glitchy, or otherwise difficult for them, they'll be less likely to use it on a regular basis and build expertise with it, making it more likely that they'll stick around.

Customer Experience

Finally, if a customer's experience connecting with other aspects of your brand — your marketing content, social media channels, customer support team, and account managers -- isn't positive, they may be likely to churn. Customers want to feel welcomed and valued by communities they support, and if they don't have positive experiences interacting with your company, they won't want to stick around.

While these factors typically cause customer churn, there are few different types of churn you should be aware of as well. In fact, you might be surprised to find that some churn is actually good for your business.

Types of Customer Churn

1. Revenue Churn

Revenue churn is slightly different than customer churn, but it's still important to consider when you're analyzing this metric. Revenue churn is the amount of revenue that's lost within a given period. This doesn't necessarily mean you're losing customers, but rather you're not making as much money from your客户群和您以前一样。

This can happen if customers downgrade to a cheaper subscription or version of your product. While they're still shopping at your business, they're spending less money than they did before. This is a metric that your customer success team will want to keep a close eye on especially as they monitor your most loyal customers.

2. Competitor Intervention

Every business has its competitors and there's always going to be some customers that will leave you for another company. It's not ideal, but it happens and you can't spend all of your time worrying about it.

更重要的是要专注于为什么这些客户将您留给您竞争。它们适合您的业务吗？或者，您正在做的事情将它们推开了吗？

一旦您弄清楚原因，您就会知道应该保留哪些客户，无论如何，哪些客户将离开您的业务。

3. Unsuccessful Onboarding

For some businesses, it's common for customer churn to take place at the beginning of the customer journey. That's because these companies typically don't offer an onboarding program that teaches the customer how to use the product or service. That means it's up to the customer to figure out how the product works and how it can meet their needs.

If you're purchasing rice, you'll probably just need a set of directions printed on the side of the box. But, if you're paying thousands of dollars for software that runs your business, you might expect a bit more from your software provider. In these cases, you may even be provided with an onboarding specialist who can teach you how to use the product and how to personalize it for your short- and long-term needs.

4.所需的功能或功能

Customers crave personalized experiences, which means most will expect your brand to create new features or products that solve their needs. If you have a diverse customer base, some may be disappointed when you roll out a new product or feature that feels irrelevant to their goals. While this new product may be great for the majority of your target audience, there may be a lingering segment that feels your brand is going in a different direction than what they expected.

This is a type of customer churn that isn't always a bad thing. If your brand is in fact going in a new direction, then that may come at the expense of some customer churn. Just be sure to actively monitor your churn rate to ensure it doesn't rise higher than what you initially anticipated.

5. Company Closure

如果您是B2B业务，那么您可能会有倒闭或与另一家公司合并的客户。bob全站app在大多数情况下，这些实例是不可避免的，并且是在B2B环境中工作的一部分。这是你的customer acquisition strategybecomes important as it balances out your customer churn rate.

6. Underappreciated Brand Values

Similar to a "bad fit" customer, some people may not align with your brand values. For example, if your company prides itself on providing eco-friendly products, you may come across some people who don't value this manufacturing process. Instead, these customers are more focused on a lower price point and fast delivery process than they are on buying “green” products.

So, do you give in and conform to these customers? Or, stand strong with your brand values?

如果你放弃,你可能在保存这些客户e short term. Sure, they'll be happy at first, but what happens when a new competitor undercuts your price and forces you to move further away from your eco-friendly values? Do you continue to drift from what originally made your brand successful?

Customers power your flywheel, but, just like a car, it's important to put the right fuel into your engine. If you conform too much to the wrong segment of your target audience, your brand will suffer over the long haul. Instead, lean into feedback from your most loyal customers, as they'll share a vision that aligns with your brand's values.

7. Plateaued Growth

As your company grows, it changes, too. Your customer base gets bigger, you hire more employees, and you can offer more products and services that appeal to a larger audience.

This type of change is great for your business, but it can sometimes come at the expense of customer churn. For instance, let's say you originally offered a free product that you now realize customers would be willing to pay for if it was packaged with another set of products. While this change will lead to more revenue, you may end up losing customers who only wanted the free product. Now that they'll have to pay for it, they'll move on to another company that doesn't charge them.

This is another example of natural customer churn. Yes, you're losing customers at first, but you're replacing them with new ones who will pay more for your product or service.

With churn coming in many shapes and sizes, it can be difficult to recognize what's natural churn, what's negative churn, and what isn't churn at all. To make sure you're aware of all types happening at your business, read on to learn how you can identify a pattern of customer churn.

How to Identify Customer Churn

建立客户流失指标。

The first step to identifying customer churn is determining what churn means for your company. Depending on your business model, churn may mean the customer cancels a subscription, uninstalls your app, or doesn't return to purchase your product after a certain period of time.

Whatever it is for your business, you'll need a set of metrics to monitor customers that are at risk of leaving your company. That way, you can set clear benchmarks for when you think a customer is about to churn. Once a customer falls below any of those benchmarks, you can reach out to see if there's anything you can do to make them happier.

您可以记录并跟踪这些指标HubSpot's free Customer Service Metrics Calculator，这可以帮助您识别何时达到不可接受的费率，以便您的公司可以正确。bob全站app

免费下载

收集客户反馈。

Sometimes customers will tell you directly when they're unhappy. For example, if you send them anNPS survey在客户服务案例之后，客户将提供有关其品牌体验的反馈。而且，此反馈既是定量又定性的，因此您可以轻松地确定哪些客户对您的业务感到不满，并了解他们为什么会有这种感觉。

Check-In With Your Customer Success Team.

您可以派遣客户成功团队为您找到自己的感觉，而不是等待客户告诉您他们的感受。监视个人帐户并与对产品或服务不满意的用户接触的是该团队的工作。这样，您的团队可以立即清除客户的任何障碍，而不是让他们与您的支持团队联系。

Most客户成功团队will check in regularly with their customers. Even if they don't have a problem to solve, these meetings are great sitreps that provide up-to-date information for how the user is feeling. As more trust is developed during these conversations, customers will be more likely to voice any concerns that may have with your business.

Prioritize Proactive Customer Service.

Proactive customer servicemeans your business is actively trying to identify and solve problems before they affect the customer experience. During this process, it's common to uncover points of friction that you may not have been aware of before. By correcting these issues, you can see how they influence your churn metrics and whether or not they were a significant cause of customer churn.

Monitor Community Forums and Third-Party Review Sites.

你是另一个方便的资源可以利用社区论坛as well as third-party review sites. Community forums are where your customers come together to talk about your products and services. If you notice the same users bashing your products again and again, then you know these people are at a higher risk of churn than those who are posting positive comments.

The same goes for third-party reviews. The people who give your company the lowest ratings are the ones who are most likely to leave your business. If you can, reply to these reviews and see if you connect with the customer through one of your company's customer support channels.

Now that you know what customer churn looks like at your business, let's talk about what you can do to reduce it.

1. Lean into your best customers.

For a lot of businesses, solving for churn means identifying a pool of customers that are most likely to cancel, and refocusing your efforts to keep them on board.

However, Sunil Gupta, the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, suggests that this strategy is lacking.

Rather than redirecting time and resources to retainingany在搅拌的边缘客户，古普塔建议企业将注意力集中在最有利可图的customers on the brink of churning.

"If I offer an incentive to customers most likely to churn, they may not leave the company, but will it be profitable for me? The traditional method is focused on reducing churn, but we contend the goal should be maximizing profits, rather than only reducing churn,"explains Gupta.

In addition to refocusing your efforts towards the most profitable customers, Gupta suggests you consider the likelihood that a customer will respond to your re-engagement initiative -- whether it is a phone call, email, or larger promotional package.

2. Be proactive with communication.

By reaching out to your customers before they need you, you're demonstrating that you're invested in helping them get the most out of your product or service.

但是没有任何旧的外展活动会做到。您发送给他们的消息或资源的类型应直接与他们的产品或服务使用情况联系在一起。

For example, if someone signs up for your product or service and you notice that they aren't leveraging all of what's available to them, you might send them a friendly nudge.

注册Semrush后，我收到了以下电子邮件，鼓励我查看一堆我尚未探索的功能：

By surfacing these features early, SEMrush was able to ensure that I wasn't overlooking the tool's capabilities -- helping to keep me both interested and active.

3.为您的新客户定义路线图。

Getting started with a new product or service can be overwhelming. And if a customer can't figure out how to navigate your product or service right out of the gate, they'll likely lose interest -- fast.

To ease the transition, it's helpful to set up anew customer onboarding流程或路线图，以指导新客户通过您的产品或服务的功能，功能和流程。这种方法使管理客户期望变得更加容易，同时您可以完全控制您浏览更多信息的步伐。

Customers that feel empowered to achieve success with the help of your business are less likely to leave, so it's important that you're constantly monitoring and iterating on your onboarding process, keeping an eye out for snags or blockers.

Looking for inspiration? Here are a couple of onboarding emails I received from Grammarly -- after signing up:

欢迎电子邮件

Notice how the welcome email introduces a bunch of popular features to help warm me up to the tool.

New Products + Features Update

This email, sent about a week after I signed up, details all of Grammarly's latest updates and improvements. By sending this to new users, Grammarly is able to communicate its commitment to improvement, while introducing a handful of new ways for users to use its services.

4. Offer incentives.

通过向客户提供一些特别的东西来使客户坚持下去 - 促销，折扣，忠诚度计划等。在向您的现有客户展示您的业务程度时，这一小努力可能会大有帮助。

When determining when to surface these incentives, there are a few things to consider. For one, you'll want to think about the customer's timeline: If they are approaching the end of their contract and you're worried they might not renew, providing a discounted renewal rate could be the push they need to stick around.

要考虑的另一件事是customer's needs. If you predict that a customer is going to cancel after realizing that your product or service isn't what they were looking for, incentivize them to stay onboard while you work on building out a feature or strategy that will help them accomplish their goals.

后者是一种策略,Baremet的人rics employed after receiving feedback from customers who were ready to cancel due to a lack of features.

“我们将在下个月的服务中享受折扣，以便在我们完成他们想要的东西时浪费他们，”explains Baremetrics' Founder Josh Pigford.

The impact? This small effort helped them save 15% of the accounts that were ready to cancel.

5. Ask for feedback often.

Customer frustration, which can ultimately lead to customer churn, surfaces when there is confusion around a product or service or a lack of effective support around a particular issue.

But those concepts are vague. And getting to the root of the specific issues plaguing your business requires you to take the time to collect feedback early and often.

Depending on your business needs, creating acustomer feedbackloop can be as easy as setting up a survey or feedback form and sending an email. Let's check out a few examples of how this has been done by brands in the past:

Dollar Shave Club

↓

Wayfair

↓

PayPal

These surveys and rating requests show the customer that you're committed to getting better -- that you're always improving.

Another way to source feedback and insights surrounding your customers' experience with your product or service? Live chat.

If you have a live chat feature enabled on your website, you can monitor those conversations to surface trends, FAQs, and common roadblocks that could be preventing your customers from seeing the full value of your product or service.

6. Analyze churn when it happens.

If you're waiting until a customer leaves your business, you're already too late to do anything about it. Instead, you should be using data before customers churn in order to build strategies to proactively prevent it.

No matter how much effort you put into the steps above, churn is a part of any business, and it will happen. The key is to use your churned customers (and your happy customers) to predict key signs of customer happiness and customer dissatisfaction so you can engage with customers and salvage the relationship before they churn.

First, start with analysis. When are customers most frequently churning? Is it 30, 60, or 90 days after they first start using your product or service? Does churn happen if customers go a specific number of days without using the product or service? Figure out how and when churn occurs for your typical customer.

Then, get feedback as outlined in Step Five above. Are customers leaving for specific reasons? What are their objections that led them to cancel or stop purchasing? Figure outwhy churn usually occurs.

Then, put these trends together so you can forecast churn before it happens, and reach out to those at-risk customers with tailored incentives and offers to re-engage them.

For example, here's an email my colleague,索菲亚·伯纳扎尼（Sophia Bernazzani）, received after taking a few SoulCycle classes in a row, then didn't book any others for three months:

Soulcycle最有可能确定锻炼课程的三个月差距标志着流失，因此他们给了她免费的课程 - 这使她回到了门口上几堂课。

7. Stay competitive.

Market conditions are constantly changing -- and as new software and technologies enter the space, the needs and demands of your customers will inevitably shift.

Businesses focused on what's next -- trends, technology, and product advancements -- position themselves in a good spot in terms of avoiding disruption or"the next big thing."

And while keeping your product or service on the cutting edge is important, it's also important that your customer success and support efforts remain relevant. To ensure your competitors aren't lapping you, make note of their customer success initiatives.

Are they responsive to questions on social media? Do they have live chat enabled on their website? Do they have an extensive知识库?

从他们的策略可以帮助你的商业ness better serve customers and retain their loyalty.

8. Provide excellent customer service.

当然，减少流失的一种好方法是提供出色的客户服务。您的服务销售代表应在客户解决问题或回答问题时为客户解决。这可能意味着他们必须花钱才能与客户合适。

Many of the big companies that you think about like Amazon or Zappos are huge companies because they focused on customer service from the beginning.

Offering excellent customer service is a great way to stand out among competitors and reduce customer churn.

9. Create a community around your customers.

客户忠于围绕其产品，服务和客户建立社区的品牌。这意味着您的营销团队可以通过与客户互动，创建Facebook组，甚至为有价值客户的活动进行计划，从而从事社区管理。

When you create a community, customers tend to stay more loyal and it will reduce the likelihood that they'll churn when something goes wrong.

10. Have customer success managers for your most valuable customers.

Another great way to reduce customer churn is to employ customer success managers that make sure all your most valuable customers are taken care of.

Customer success managers will give customers tips on how to get the most out of your product or service. Additionally, they're the main point of contact for your valuable customers so they can reach out to someone directly instead of waiting on hold for a frontline customer service rep.

停止在轨道上搅动

Churn确实会给您的业务造成损失 - 但前提是您允许它。通过应用我们上面概述的提示bob全站app，请重新安排您公司的轨迹。