Customer Churn Follow-Up

You can gain more practical value from tracking churn rate if you do a follow-up churn analysis to identify why you’re losing customers. Factors that promote customer decisions to leave may emerge at any stage of your customer’s journey with your brand, including:

• Sales misrepresenting your product
• Problems experienced during their initial purchase
• Issues during or failure to complete Onboarding
• Difficulties with product adoption, such as trouble learning to use advanced features
• Frustrations experienced with customer success and support issues
• Problems with your renewal process
• Stakeholder or key champion leaving the company
• Company organization restructures
• Customer business model changes
  

Systematically charting your customer’s journey by creating a customer journey map can provide you with a basis for analyzing potential causes of churn. A churn analysis checklist looks for trends in your data to answer questions such as:

• Are your customers experiencing any problems from the handoff between sales to onboarding?
• Are they able to complete the onboarding process smoothly and in a timely manner?
• Is their usage of your product frequent enough to deliver consistent value?
• Have they submitted customer support tickets for help with a frequently asked question or a common issue?
  

You can ask these types of questions with respect to your customers as a whole, segments of your customer base or individual customers. Analyzing trends in your churn data and other customer data with these types of questions in mind can lend you insight into issues that are costing you customers, empowering you to take corrective measures.

How to Follow Up With Churned Customers to Save Revenue

The first evidence of possible churn that emerges through the early-warning alerts you have set up based on customer success metrics or events should trigger immediate action. 

You should be ready to deploy a series of previously prepared, enterprise-wide next steps that reinvigorate product interest and incentivize engagement. 

Winback campaigns are a great way to do this, however, there might be a unique situation that requires a more personal customer offer. 

Setting tasks for your CSM to meet with their boss to strategize on next steps might be the most appropriate way to handle those specific situations. 

There are several practices you can pursue to effectively win back customers and reduce churn:

• Offer upgrade/downgrade options that better align your product with customer use
• Consider financially repackaging your service to drive greater ROI
• Provide additional, free seminars and webinars that promote product features
• Acknowledge any issues and offer solutions
• Introduce product and service improvements
• Re-onboard customers or provide additional training on product use
• Build relationships within multiple levels of the organization
  

Depending on the cause of the potential churn, you may need to implement more than one of these solutions. 

The right customer success solution can not only help you predict customer churn, but also prompt your CS team to take practical and immediate action to prevent it.