3 Ways to Automatically Reduce Customer Churn

Customer churn stands in the way of growing your business. How do you battle it?

When it comes to online products and services, there are often digital signs of behavioral intent. If you’re able to respond to those signs quickly, you have a better chance of retaining those users.

Back in 2013, the helpdesk SaaS company Groove was seeing its customers leaving at a higher rate than ever before. They wanted to reach out to at-risk customers, but realized they didn’t know who those customers were.

When Groove decided to examine user behavior to gain insight into a person’s likelihood to churn during their free trial, they found that customer actions spoke 1,000 words. It all came down to the time spent people spent using Groove in their first session and frequency of logins.

Groove decided to reach out with a tailored message to anyone who spent less than a few minutes on their first session or logged in “fewer than 2 times a day in their first 10 days.” This helped them cut churn by 71%.

Groove’s approach was incredibly effective because ultimately it was a smart data-driven solution to a retention problem: they responded to the real-time context of customer behavior, reaching out to people in a systematic way.

How to Approach Customers at Risk of Churning

As in the Groove example, the first step is to identify the behaviors you want to see and where those behaviors drop off, which you can do with analytics and user interviews. Then figure out how to bridge that behavioral gap for people.

For example, here’s how this planning process might look for a new user who fails to complete a key action:

• Behavior: A new user doesn’t finish a key action (like filling out a profile, setting up a project, completing a training) and hasn’t come back.
• What the customer is saying: This behavior is the customer saying, I didn’t experience value yet, so I’m not motivated to return. Maybe I’m confused or don’t understand something, or forgot about your product because I got busy.
• Your response: Provide a motivational spark to get them back to your product to continue checking things out or learning. Provide a story or education to help them make progress to the next major step, or check in to ask if they need help.

Automating Workflows to Keep Customers Happy

Now let’s explore three different ways to automate these responses:

Send Email Messages that Spur Progress

Sometimes all people need is a little helpful nudge at the right time. For example, here’s what Elevate, a game-based brain-training app, does if you don’t complete the first training session. Instead of nagging at you or providing a useless “We miss you” message, they proactively address three types of issues you might be running into.

From a mismatch in difficulty level, expectations for how to fit Elevate into a busy life, or wanting more options, the message provides a specific justification for why you should return to the app for another whirl.

Trigger Tickets for Customer Support

Triggering internal communication is a great strategy for preventing churn as well. Let’s go back to the Groove example. You’ve identified people with a short first session or few log-ins as customers at risk. What else can you do besides send a quick automated email?

Let your support or success team know. Real-time intelligence about customer behavior—including lack of activity—empowers them to do proactive work and keep up with the state of customer health.

You can trigger the creation of a ticket in your helpdesk service like Groove, Zendesk or Help Scout based on behavioral data. Then your support team can reach out for proactive support efforts or as an escalation of outreach when an account is unresponsive to your automated emails. A support or success team can have conversations to learn what is or isn’t working for a customer or simply say thanks, all based on customer history and context.

Automating helpdesk notifications is a powerful approach to support and success, adding a competitive edge especially when compared to teams who only talk to customers when customers initiate the conversation in times of crisis.

Automate Tasks in Internal Productivity Tools

You can also use behavioral triggers to automate the creation of tasks in productivity and project management tools for teams outside support who aren’t in helpdesk tools all day.

Our own success team at Customer.io, for instance, makes sure they’re proactively nurturing our customers’ progress. The team uses a Trello board to keep track of proactive outreach tasks that sets new customers up for success.

One list on that board is the “New Customer Checklist.” Once an account converts into a paid subscription, our automation creates a Trello card in this list with a manual checklist for the team to go through, verifying that their integration is implemented properly to double-checking that the account complies with our company anti-spam policy.

Customer retention relies on building long-term relationship and meaningful connections with people. Data equips businesses with a vital opportunity to provide personalized communication, support, and a great user experience with context, specificity, and relevance. Automating workflows, from external messaging to internal notifications, by responding to customer behavior is one way to accomplish this at scale and build trusting, longer-term customer relationships.

Janet Choi heads up product marketing and content at Customer.io.

Related Articles:

Understanding Churn: Why Do Customers Unsubscribe? 

The Mysteries of No Complaints and Customer Retention

Leveraging Data to Avoid Customer Churn: A Cautionary Tale