Are Your Customers Jumping Ship?
Are you still struggling with customer churn?
You have created a subscription offering, and you’re running your business and encounter a lot of churn. What’s happening? As Bill Gates once said “Your unhappy customers are the best source of learning”.
The challenge is to keep your subscription offering fresh, resulting in lifetime customers. It is unlikely all your customers stay onboard forever, but in this article, we outline strategies to keep churn to a minimum.
Create excitement and interaction and continue the relationship your customers are used to.
#1 — Customer chemistry
Customers like to be treated with royal service. Ensuring you offer adequate and prompt service along the customer journey is paramount. Every part of your customer support services needs to be running effectively: from responding to questions and taking calls to delivering product and scheduling services. Welcoming, efficient, and caring are the adjectives to keep in mind; create a list of best practices and train your employees extensively. Use easy to run customer service apps to allow self-services and drive initiative-taking responses to outstanding queries. These aspects will ensure that your customer satisfaction stabilises based on great customer chemistry.
#2 — Listen to your employees and customers
Loyal customers grow a business faster than sales or marketing. If we never ask for customer feedback, we’ll never understand what drives customer satisfaction. If we don’t know what drives satisfied customers, it will be impossible to create customer loyalty. The same counts for your employees that collaborate daily with your customers. Developing a feedback loop,and gathering feedback in the moment of need is crucial to drive business improvements and innovation initiatives. Tactically, it is also a rather easy step to take, here are some ways to get going:
- Use a tool to send out relevant and in-the-moment surveys using NPS style feedback questions. Microsoft Forms is an example of an easy tool to trigger a survey, for example after billing the customer for their subscription.
- Setup customer meetings in a defined frequency and listen to their input and feedback, document where needed and act promptly on any items pending.
- Run frequent debriefing or retrospectives with your teams and capture what went well and what did not go well.
#3 — Stay in touch with customer teams
Every customer interaction is a people business. Knowing your customer’s teams and staying in the loop is a wonderful way to ensure you are on top of your subscription services and how the people at the end perceive your performance. When teams or people dynamics change for the customer, help new people onboard and ensure they see the value of your subscription services. Explain what has been achieved and what is on the roadmap in the next months to come. Create excitement and interaction and continue the relationship your customers are used to.
#4 — Be transparent about any shortcomings
Your subscription is not perfect. Customers might figure out elements of your subscription service that are not meeting their requirements. No worries, it happens to the best of us. Dealing with shortcomings is part of the job. Here’s a few ways to deal with it:
- Schedule a meeting addressing the issue(s) with the customer and stakeholders
- Learn and understand the issues at hand and ask questions to get deep insights into what your customer is expecting from your subscription and service
- Decide an action plan quickly and stay in communication on every item of the plan
- Decide if you can resolve the shortcoming or not. In case you cannot overcome it, explain why, and figure out if your service or product is still bringing enough business value for the price paid
- If your customer perceived the value to be too low to continue, formally close the relationship in a friendly manner.
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