Comparing your customer rolls can create delight or dread. If your regulars seem to be dropping like flies, you’ve got an issue with customer churn. Customer churn may cause serious problems for your business, especially if it comes from bad customer experience design. The good news is that you can create a CX strategy that beats back customer churn.
What Is Customer Churn?
If you’ve ever had a bad experience at a business and said, “Never again!” you know what customer churn looks like. Customer churn refers to the process where consumers disengage with a particular company and decide to go elsewhere. The simple calculation compares the pool of existing customers to the ones you had before.
Churn doesn’t always happen because of something you did. Sometimes customers find an alternative because they can’t afford your products or services. New technology sometimes renders businesses obsolete, so the customers leave because they don’t need it. Economic instability makes people hang on tight to their cash, even for necessities.
What Happens During High Customer Churn?
Since customer churn happens to everyone, you might wonder when you actually have to worry about it. High levels of churn can run you right out of business if you’re not careful. With a high churn, you have a lot of customers who make a purchase or two and then disappear. You don’t have the chance to build loyalty because they don’t stay long enough.
Over time, too much churn can make it harder to run your business. You’re constantly searching for leads. Your marketing and sales budgets go way up to compensate. If these efforts don’t lead to a reliable pool of potential buyers, you may struggle to cover your overhead.
What Is Customer Experience?
Does the prospect of customer churn make you wonder how to keep your buyers happy? Start by looking at your customer experience. Customer experience covers all the things your customer thinks about or does when they interact with your company. Everything is up for consideration, from their cousin’s opinion about your products to the deodorizer you use in customer bathrooms.
Although some aspects of CX have nothing to do with your actual business, many do. It ties to branding, social media, website interactions, purchases, and more. Customers use the way they feel when they look, shop, or make a purchase to help them fill out the customer experience. If you do it right, they’ll keep a positive view.
How Does CX Relate to Customer Churn?
Customers might leave for any reason, but it’s often an issue with the customer experience. Think about how your customers relate to your business. CX may be all-encompassing, but you can break it up into smaller pieces. Start searching for the little things that your customers hate about engaging with your company, like a clunky app or a lack of payment options.
Don’t let environmental factors help you ignore the problems in front of your face. A lousy market won’t make customers stop buying, but they’ll steer clear of shops with poor layouts or online ordering platforms. Changing your products to meet trends won’t fix a site that was hard to browse in the first place.
How Can Companies Improve Customer Loyalty?
Before you decide that churn is something that you can’t control, you need to put your priorities in order. Customers are loyal to businesses where they have good experiences, but even one bad transaction can spoil the barrel. To turn your customers into loyal buyers that stick with you, you have to focus on improving every interaction.
Make the Journey Seamless
Customers progress along a journey to the purchase. It starts with thinking about buying a product or signing up for a service. Consumers move through research and comparison, finally landing on a company. Sometimes they get lost on the way, especially if the experience isn’t fulfilling.
To keep your customers moving, you should make the entire journey seamless. Make it easy to find your company. Streamline your branding so that everyone knows it’s you. Research what your customer goes through at each stage of the experience, and aim to solve their problems. Avoid putting all your efforts into one step. Too much effort on the exploration side might leave an unsatisfactory payment process. Unbalanced investment in the payment platform could make it harder for your customers to even reach that point.
Personalize Interactions
When you log into a familiar site, you expect the organization to know who you are and why you’re there. Most of your regulars feel the same way. They expect personalization in the form of greetings, product recommendations, and other useful information. You’ll probably need to collect some data to provide it. You can find a range of tools to simplify the collection and processing. Just be sensible about your use of data. Be clear about what you collect and how you use it. Make it easy for customers to opt out.
Be Proactive About Support
Customers don’t want to feel like you’re throwing them to the wolves. You need to be there to provide support at each stage. Have a tester go through your buying process. Ask them to identify points where your customers might need help. Then, work on providing multiple ways to support them. A chatbot can help them find the products they need or log into their billing management services. FAQs can explain shipping policies and other terms. Even the addition of a functional search bar can assist customers in completing the transaction. You have a ton of options at your disposal. Just don’t wait until your customers are fleeing to implement them.
Integrate Feedback
When you get a good piece of feedback, resist the urge to explain it away. Instead, consider it and see how you could address the issue. Sometimes customers reach your business through a different path than you expect. They have unique experiences that mean they don’t always shop or sign up the way you expect. Their feedback can be a treasure trove of information you can use to improve CX. Integrate it where you can and continue seeking out opinions.
Customer churn happens to every business, but you don’t have to let it ruin your success. By integrating these tips into your customer experience strategy, you can foster better relationships.
⸻ Author Bio ⸻
Matt Ream is the Director of Product Marketing at BillingPlatform. With extensive experience in product marketing, particularly for B2B SaaS companies, Ream has a proven track record of establishing robust marketing foundations and positioning products as industry leaders.
