Customer churn. It’s on everybody’s mind right now.
But are you leveraging your customer community as one of your top tools to recognize and mitigate churn risk?
Community allows your customers to engage with your product and brand on their own terms. It’s a space for customers to share best practices, trade product knowledge, and get the answers they need—all of which help people get the most out of your product and gain value from it.
The result? A stronger, healthier relationship and less churn.
Community’s one-to-many, digital-led approach helps you engage with your customers at scale. And that engagement—whether it’s a question in the community, a search in the knowledge base, product feedback, or a feature request—is one of the best ways to understand customer health.
So, how exactly can a community help you reduce churn?
Let’s take a look.
1. Driving Engagement
Engagement is the beating pulse of communities. Whether a customer is exploring onboarding content, joining discussions, searching for help content, answering questions, or providing product feedback – engagement is a good thing. Because no matter how you engage your customers, an engaged customer is a customer that shows up. They’re there to do the work, and they’re willing—but perhaps not always able. That’s where peer-to-peer comes into play.
Let’s be honest. Sometimes our customers have better practices, hacks, and creative solutions for our products than we do. That’s why a community where free-flowing knowledge exchange between customers is invaluable. Whether it’s about sharing those best practices, helping them solve a problem, or simply pointing them to the right content, peer-to-peer engagement enables customers to self-serve at scale. If you don’t always have the best or right answers at hand, we can guarantee someone in the community does.
Another great thing about communities? They never close.
2. Creating Autonomy
This is the age of the empowered, autonomous customer. They want to do things in their own time and—on their own terms. The solution? Self-service.
Self-service simply means to offer your customers the means to be successful with your product or service on their own. It’s like putting together your own fitness program, with guidance from your personal trainer and support from your peers.
When you create a seamless self-service experience for your customers with a knowledge base, you combine your help content with user-generated content to give them the fastest answers possible.
P2P interactions and self-service initiatives facilitate a smooth customer experience, with the customer community serving as the central hub for these interactions.
Sure, there’s a time and place for human-led CS—remember, they are not at odds— but if you facilitate autonomy, you’re very likely to see:
- Increased engagement
- Faster product adoption
- Reduced churn
With more autonomous customers, your CSMs will be able to focus on proactive tasks and design success plans that give customers even more control over their experience while reducing time to value.
3. Having a Say
The voice of the customer is more important than ever. Customers want to feel heard, and they want to have a say in the development of the product they’re paying for. A community provides them with the platform to do just that. It’s their direct line to Product Managers and influencing the roadmap.
What does this mean for your teams? Your CSMs and Product Managers won’t have to invest time and resources into collecting enough feedback to arrive at meaningful insights. Instead, that feedback (and plenty of it) will be provided organically in the community.
When your customers are actively involved in the process via a Voice of the Customer program, they’ll be more likely to try new features when you release them. Ultimately, you’re creating a more sticky product by allowing your customers to build the product alongside you.
And what does a more sticky product mean? Less churn.
Learn more about closing the CS-Product loop.
More Insights, Less Churn
In times of economic uncertainty, it’s clearer than ever for SaaS businesses that recurring revenue can’t be taken for granted. Customer engagement has a direct correlation to churn. The higher the engagement, the less churn, and vice versa. But just because you’re implementing a community doesn’t automatically mean increased engagement and less churn. The goal of your community, just like that of your product, is to provide ongoing and continuous value to your customers. With Community’s digital approach, you can engage with your customers at scale to provide maximum value.
Once you’ve made Community a part of your retention strategy, you’ll be able to better understand customer needs, have a more informed view of customer health, and ultimately, you’ll be able to leverage that knowledge to reduce churn.
Ready to Reduce Churn with Community?
Looking create a single destination for your customers to connect, share best practices, provide feedback, and build a stronger relationship with your product?
Schedule a demo to discover the community platform that keeps your customers coming back for more.
