Customer Service

Customer success: 10 strategies to reduce customer churn

There are many competing priorities for businesses, but adopting a good customer success strategy is a task that should not be ignored. While focusing on acquiring new customers is critical for business growth, firms must not overlook the significance of retaining and serving existing customers.

The business process of customer success may be a relatively new concept, yet it is crucial to meeting both your organisation's commercial goals, and your customers' satisfaction. When done correctly, customer success can lead to higher customer loyalty, lower churn and increased revenue. This may require innovative thinking and a comprehensive understanding of the human-machine link in consumer experiences.


10 tips to increase customer loyalty

A bitter truth is that just one terrible experience (all previous pleasant ones forgotten!) is all it takes to change customer loyalty. Here’s what you can do to ensure that doesn’t happen with your business:

  1. Guide your first-time customers.
  2. Provide support to new customers until they are comfortable with all aspects of your product and service. An onboarding process that walks prospective customers through the capabilities of your product and service is reassuring. It is a wonderful method to efficiently manage client expectations. It also pays to regularly check your onboarding process for snags or roadblocks.

  3. Ensure access to the right information.
  4. Even the most comprehensive onboarding programme cannot stop after-questions from cropping up. Giving customers access to the right resources and information will help them better understand the full potential of your offerings.

    A variety of educational resources such as webinars, individual sessions, content on your website, and virtual workshops might be able to accommodate your customers' varying learning styles and stages of the journey.

    Educational resources also serve another purpose—a decrease in the demand for customer service. If customers have easy access to answers to their questions, your support team will spend less time responding to repeat queries. Instead, they can dedicate their time to expanding resources based on your evolving customer needs.

  5. Communicate proactively.
  6. Contact your customers before a need arises. This demonstrates that you care about them getting value from your product or service.

    "If you just communicate, you get by. But if you communicate skillfully, you can work miracles" - Jim Rohn

    Wise words.

    However, both the message and the approach must be tailored to the product they use.
    For example, if you find that clients aren't taking advantage of all of the capabilities of your product/service, you may give them a gentle nudge.

  7. Offer incentives.
  8. The smallest gesture — promotion, discount, or loyalty programme — goes a long way. It shows your customers that they are valued, and it motivates them to be loyal to your business.

    The key is to time these incentives well. Maybe offer a discounted renewal rate close to the contract end date; or, if you get a whiff that you might lose a customer due to a lack of features, then incentivize them to stay onboard long enough for you to develop that feature.

  9. Request feedback frequently.
  10. Frustrated customers — due to a lack of effective support — are sure to leave you. Getting to the root of specific issues plaguing your customers through early and regular feedback mechanisms is the only chance you have of retaining them.

  11. Delve into your data.
  12. A proactive way to lessen, if not prevent customer churn, is by using analytical tools to dig into existing customer-churn data to build strategies.

    No matter how hard you try, customer churn is unavoidable. Then, why not use the information to better engage with customers and salvage the relationship before they churn?

    Look for correlations in the churn data. When are customers most frequently losing interest: Is it 30 days, or 90 days after they first start using your product or service? Do they churn due to the non-use of the product or service for a specific length of time?

    Customer-churn data and feedback data offer the necessary insights that help you develop an action plan to engage with customers and prevent customer churn.

  13. Embrace technology and stay competitive.
  14. We live in the “what next” generation. Technological advances that help meet ever-changing needs are difficult to ignore. Businesses that keep their attention focused on changes such as  trends, technological applications, advancements in product features, etc., and make changes accordingly,  tend to avoid disruptions.

    Here's a tip: Take cues from your competitors' strategies. If you can’t beat them, join them!

  15. Create a community.
  16. A social media community (Facebook group, WhatsApp group) for your most valued customers is an effective way to engage with customers, plan events, encourage a healthy exchange of product/service-related information/woes, and in general, communicate easily with a large customer base.

  17. Engage customer success managers.
  18. Another helpful way to reduce customer churn is to employ people (customer success managers) whom customers can contact directly (rather than waiting on hold for a frontline customer care representative) and who give customers timely value propositions. This helps to establish direct relationships with customers and helps them achieve their goals.

  19. Excellent service does the trick.
  20. Great products and poor service don’t make a winning combination. Empower your service representatives to satisfactorily answer all customer queries and resolve issues.

    The most successful companies you can think of — Amazon and Google — are where they are because they focused on customer service from the beginning.


Don’t allow churn to take a toll on your business

Consider this: Even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profitability by at least 25%.

This emphasises how imperative it is to ensure that customers are kept happy. The way forward is to lean towards customer success, a proactive although time- and resource-consuming approach. So, instead of wasting your assets on any churning customers, focus on the most profitable customers you believe you are most likely to lose.

“Starve your distractions, feed your focus” ~ Anonymous

Are you ready to laser-focus on your customer success strategy?

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.


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