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5 Ways to Reduce Churn by Delivering a Consistent Customer Experience
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This is a guest blog post by Dhruv Mehta from Acquire.
Truth be told, there’s a direct relationship between customer retention and higher profits. In fact, here’s the evidence that supports this claim: According to research by the Bain & Company, “A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.” Plus, “Businesses miss out on $1.6 trillion from losing customers to a competitor.” And finally, “Acquiring new customers costs 5 times as much as retaining existing ones.”
Clearly, reducing customer churn is a profitable endeavor for companies and customers alike. So here are top-5 tried-and-tested strategies that help reduce churn and iron out your customer experience.
Top 5 Churn Reducing Strategies for a Consistent Customer Experience
1. Offer a Seamless Onboarding Program for Creating an Effective “First Impression”
Even in the customer experience world, first impressions matter. Merely getting customers to ‘Sign Up’ is not enough. They also need to actively engage with your product/service.
You’ll be surprised to know that most customers often lose interest after signing up. This happens due to numerous factors such as inability to understand the offering, inability to extract the true value of the offering, finding more cost-effective solutions elsewhere, and so on. In such a scenario, creating a fast and smooth onboarding program becomes critical. Take the example of Airtable’s onboarding process, which breaks down the steps into a logical flow and uses clear CTAs and a simple UI to demonstrate exactly how users can get started in the onboarding process. Plus, the platform goes the extra mile to understand the new user’s persona and extract relevant use cases:
As you can imagine, this kind of a detailed, concise, and transparent onboarding roadmap motivates users to complete the process instead of ‘abandoning’ it mid-way.
2. Offer Real-Time Support for Boosting your Rate of Return Customers
“83% of US clients prefer to deal with humans, rather than digital channels, when it comes to customer service issues.” – Accenture
According to research by the Harvard Business Review, here are the two most critical findings that affect every company’s customer service strategy:
- Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.
- Acting deliberately on this insight can help improve customer service, reduce customer service costs, and decrease customer churn.
So how do you ensure that your customers don’t have their share of work cut out for them?
The answer is simple. By integrating live chat software into your existing customer experience strategy.
Unlike human agents, live chat software is available 24×7 and can offer instant support – a huge advantage if research is to be believed:
“More than half of consumers expect a response from customer service within an hour, even on weekends.” – Edelman Digital
Key takeaway: Whether it’s 3 am or a Sunday, live chat is always available for customers who wish to self-serve and gain solutions to their queries quickly. It allows for a glitch-free user experience and helps foster a more meaningful and organic relationship with users. More importantly, it frees up valuable time of your human agents so that they can redirect their energies towards solving complex issues that require human intervention.
3. Send Timely Push Notifications & Reminder Emails with Personalized Offers
Email marketing has long been in use to engage with new users and re-engage with existing, loyal customers. In fact, using a heady combination of push notifications and personalized emails – sparingly and strategically – allows customers to feel that the brand is genuinely interested in serving them. However, ensure that you’re not overwhelming the customers with one-too-many emails and messages, or else you’ll find your mails and related communication going into the “Spam” folder.
Take a look at a Welcome Email by the Envira Gallery:
You’ll notice that the email gets quite a few many things right from the get-go:
- The language, style, and tone used are warm and user-friendly, making the customer feel special and welcome by the brand.
- It encourages the customer to engage with the brand and educates them by inserting relevant ‘Getting started links’ and a handy knowledge base, complete with documentation and guides, to help users along the way.
- It empowers users to connect with the company by asking questions or sharing feedback so that all their issues are resolved from start to finish.
Key takeaway: Such a marketing mix can influence the user to make a return visit with reduced churn. That said, the company has ensured that they maintain great customer experience throughout the communication to leverage the full advantage of this unique marketing strategy.
4. Create an ‘Ideal User Persona’ before Investing in Marketing Programs
You could have the best marketing program in the world, but if you’re rushing to push sales to the wrong kind of target audience, your churn rate is bound to skyrocket. In other terms, a poorly-researched user persona lends itself to an inaccurate product/market fit causing higher customer churn. Long story short, if you’re not creating a user persona, you’re shooting in the dark.
Plus, remember that accurate user personas can help organizations to target customers in a more personalized, relevant, and effective capacity. This is extremely important according to data by Forbes, which claims that:
“33% of consumers ended their relationship with a company because the experience wasn’t personalized enough.”
Here’s an excellent example of a detailed user persona by the Marketing Insight to consider:
On the other hand, random programs can increase the bounce rate while adversely affecting the customer experience.
Key takeaway: All things considered, it’s important for businesses to tailor their customer experiences based on the user’s needs, tastes, and preferences. This is where an accurate user persona can come in handy.
5. Collect ‘Customer Feedback’ on an Ongoing Basis
When it comes to acing your customer retention efforts, gathering feedback is key. In fact, a survey by Salesforce predicts that “62% of clients share the bad experience of your business with people.”
At the other end of the spectrum, around “60% of consumers talk about a brand they’re loyal to their family and friends” as per data by Yotpo.
So if you don’t listen to your customers and integrate their feedback into your ongoing customer experience strategy, you run the risk of losing them or, worse, receiving negative word-of-mouth publicity.
Take a look at Headspace’s feedback survey initiative for inspiration:
Notice how the brand’s communication is warm and friendly, and encourages users to take the survey without boring them to death – a refreshing change, don’t you think?
Key takeaway: Unhappy and happy clients don’t shy away from airing their concerns and reviews. So, companies need to actively monitor feedback and work towards improving their customer experience at all touchpoints in the customer’s journey.
Handy tip: If you wish to reduce customer churn, focus on identifying a pool of most profitable users who are on the point of churning.
Final Thoughts
In today’s age, reducing customer churn is as important as acquiring new customers. So to sum up, here are the top-5 strategies you can try and integrate into your customer experience journey to establish a brand that’s profitable and one that doesn’t experience a churn rate enough to shut down the business in the long run:
- Offer a seamless onboarding experience to create an ever-lasting impression.
- Extend real-time support to lower churn rates.
- Send timely push notifications and personalized reminder emails from time-to-time.
- Create an accurate and research-driven user persona.
- Collect and act on your customer’s feedback to retain users and drive loyalty.
Try these tips and deliver a customer experience that most brands can only dream of.