To gain more practical value from tracking churn rate, it’s important to do a follow-up analysis to identify why you’re losing customers.
Factors that influence customer decisions to leave may emerge at any stage of your customer journey, including:
- Sales misrepresenting your product
- Selling to businesses outside your ideal customer profile
- 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
- Losing an executive stakeholder or key champion at the company
- Company organization restructures
- Customer business model changes
Creating a customer journey map allows you to outline your customer’s experience, providing a foundation for identifying potential causes of churn.
A churn analysis checklist can help uncover trends in your data and address key questions like:
- Are your customers facing challenges during their journey — from the sales handoff to onboarding?
- Can they navigate the onboarding process smoothly and within an appropriate timeframe?
- Are they using your product frequently enough to gain consistent value?
- Have they submitted support tickets for common issues or frequently asked questions?
- Is your team engaging with the right stakeholders?
- How has engagement with key decision-makers evolved over time?
These questions can be applied to your entire customer base, specific segments, or even individual customers. By analyzing trends in customer churn, you can uncover the underlying issues driving customer losses. This enables you to take proactive, targeted actions to address these challenges and retain more customers.
Strategies to reduce customer churn
Customer churn can seem unpredictable, but proactive strategies can help you improve retention, drive upsells, and boost advocacy.
1. Align to your customer’s goals: If you want to lower customer churn rates, creating successful customers should be your top priority. To do this, you must align with your customer’s goals to become a trusted partner, not just another vendor. Strengthen your customer relationships by:
- Understanding goals early: Collaborate during onboarding to define their key objectives and desired outcomes from your product or service.
- Checking in regularly: Schedule check-ins to reassess goals and adapt as priorities shift.
- Providing proactive support: Customize your strategy to guide customers toward success with best practices, additional training sessions, and ongoing support.
- Maintaining open communications: Foster honest dialogue to maintain trust and uncover evolving needs.
2. Accelerate onboarding: It’s easier for customers to abandon a process they’re only part-way through.
Customers with a successful onboarding experience are more likely to become dedicated participants and advocates of your product, particularly if you regularly engage with them to keep them active. Keep customers engaged by:
- Supporting them through implementation
- Helping them define key goals
- Establishing buy-in from their leadership
- Creating a customer map to guide implementation
- Monitoring progress to prevent stalls
3. Identify and track key metrics: Track and analyze the right engagement metrics to make data-backed decisions and improve customer success. Low usage can signal potential churn. Focus on key data points, such as usage frequency, feature adoption rates, and support ticket trends, to identify signs of stagnant or declining engagement.
Use this data to proactively address gaps by tailoring training, support, and customer programs that guide users toward full adoption and maximize their success. Data-driven insights are the foundation of long-term loyalty.
4. Support evolving teams: As teams change, engagement can drop. Shifting team dynamics or change in a stakeholder can cause interactions with your product to wane, so it’s crucial to onboard new members quickly.
Regular communication, either through automated campaigns or a high-touch motion, with your customers helps maintain product visibility and provides ongoing education. If you notice a drop in engagement, contact additional team members or management and offer tailored training for new users. This keeps your product at the forefront of stakeholders' minds, while highlighting its importance to their success.
5. Be transparent about feature releases: Customers who use your product and submit feature requests may feel like no one is listening to or cares about their feedback if they don’t get a timely response.
People who submit requests are engaged with your product, so their feedback should be considered for future enhancements. Continue to engage with users, respond to their requests, and share their feedback with the product team.
Truly engaged customers may even be interested in signing up for beta product releases, where they can help test new feature ideas and product usability.
6. Communicate with management: Changes in executive stakeholders or the loss of a product champion could impact production adoption and utilization.
If you have visibility into your customer’s internal organization, you may pick up signals of restructuring or shifting roles in leadership.
Managers are key champions and advocates for your product, and they can help others understand its value and benefits. It’s important to communicate with new leaders to stay on top of changing goals and strategies.
7. Adapt to shifting goals: As your customer's roadmap evolves, they may find that the goals they had a year ago aren’t what they’re working towards today.
If you’ve established an expectation of open communication with your customers, they may ask for more advanced or different features or a lower fee structure to meet their goals. You may establish metrics that monitor their progress and offer existing solutions within your product that fit their shifting needs.
Circulate customer feedback internally to see if there’s a way to scale your product up or down to support client goals. If your product is not delivering the right results, you may need to revise and monitor your internal program goals and performance.