What is customer churn and how do you reduce it?

In this article, we discuss what you need to know about customer churn.

Shark Finesse
March 26, 2024
Articles

Customer churn is a key metric for any business as it has a direct impact on a company's overall success. The cost of gaining new customers is much higher than retaining existing ones, making it very important for businesses to focus on reducing customer churn. In this article, we discuss what exactly customer churn is and some of the ways to reduce it.

What is customer churn?

Customer churn refers to the percentage of customers that stopped using a company's product or service during a specific time frame. Measuring the customer churn rate is essential for gaining insights into business performance and identifying potential areas for improvement. The customer churn rate is calculated by dividing the number of customers lost during a specific time frame, by the total number of customers at the beginning of that time frame. A very simplified example would be if a company starts with 100 customers and loses 10 over a month, the churn rate would be 10%.

Why is measuring your customer churn rate important?

Measuring your customer churn rate allows your business to evaluate efforts in retaining customers and make informed decisions to decrease churn. Familiarising yourself with the numbers relating to your business’s customer churn can help you to develop different strategies to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Ways to reduce customer churn.

Reducing customer churn is crucial for businesses to maintain a stable and growing customer base. There are several effective strategies that can be implemented to reduce customer churn:

Analyse your customer churn patterns.

Analysing churn patterns is essential for understanding the reasons behind why you may not be retaining your customers. By utilising and analysing your data, you can identify the common factors that contribute to customer churn. This analysis may involve examining customer behaviour, product usage, demographic information, and any customer feedback. By identifying these different patterns and trends, you can then make informed decisions to address specific points and improve customer retention.

Improving your customer service.

Exceptional customer service plays a vital role in reducing customer churn. Personalised interactions with your customers can go a long way in obtaining customer loyalty and satisfaction. Some ways to improve your customer service may be utilising customer service tools such as chatbots, to be time efficient.

Use loyalty programs.

Loyalty programs are powerful tools for improving customer retention. They are used to help provide incentives to customers to help keep them engaged with your brand and will also reward their loyalty to you. For example, offering exclusive discounts based off previous purchases can help to encourage customers to purchase from you again.

Educate your customers about your products and services.

Educating customers about the benefits and value of your products or services is crucial for reducing customer churn. Creating comprehensive how-to guides, tutorials, and knowledge bases helps your customers understand the features and capabilities of the productor service, enhancing their overall experience. This helps to maximise the value the customers gain from their purchase reducing the likelihood of customer churn.

Post-implementation / Customer Success Reviews.

These assessments are conducted after the completion and deployment of a project, initiative, or system within an organisation. These reviews aim to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall success of the implemented solution or change. The key objectives of the reviews typically are to assess the goals achievement, identify success or challenges, analyse lessons learnt, evaluate stakeholder satisfaction, review KPI’s, and identify any areas for improvement. To effectively conduct a post-implementation review you will need the original business case that was used to quantify the potential value of a new solution to compare against.

Contact Shark Finesse if you would like to learn how we can help reduce your customer churn rate.

What we do

At Shark Finesse we have developed an enterprise-grade cloud application to help businesses standardise and simplify their value engagements across the entire customer journey.

Shark, a business value engagement platform used by 1000’s of customer-facing teams globally (e.g. pre-sales, sales, value teams, and customer success) is easy to use, intuitive and usable directly with the customer to negotiate the likely business returns from investing in a solution.

By adopting the Shark approach you will fundamentally transform conversations with new and existing customers, close more business, and differentiate from the competition.