Customers are the top priority for any business. Don’t you agree? Companies are spending billions of dollars in advertising or promoting the products. All of this for whom? Aren’t they putting all these efforts to grab the attention of their customer?
Even after all these efforts, you can’t avoid customer churn. There are many reasons why a customer turns back from your brand. It may be due to the reduction in your quality. You’re putting more effort to acquire new customers but neglecting your loyal customers.
Whatever the reason is? Losing a customer or churn is not what companies are aiming at.
Customers bring revenue and promote your company by word-of-mouth. If you lose a customer, indirectly you’re losing the indirect customers they bring to your business. Losing a customer is inevitable for any business, but that doesn’t mean that you should allow it to happen. You must come up with strategies to retain them. As customer retention plays an important factor in defining organisations success. Achieving zero per cent churn rate is impossible for any business, but you must keep it as low as possible. Companies are spending more on retaining the existing customers rather than to acquire new customers.
Here are a few tips for any business to reduce customer churn.
Analyse and understand
Before taking the necessary steps, it is important to analyse the root cause of the problem.
If you don’t understand the problem, how will you solve it?
Next time you see the unexpected churn in your business. Identify the problem first to come up with a solution. Find out why the customer has left the brand. You can send them an exit survey, call them or reach them through an email.
Talk to your customers and ask why they have changed their brand. It helps you in knowing your shortcomings and at the same time show your audience that you care about them. Make sure to conduct your surveys easy and simple, because if there are many questions people may all together omit it as it takes a lot of time and effort to fill it. Send them through emails or you can keep them on your websites. But once you get the information, remember to use it to improve your services.
Strengths and weaknesses
Every business has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Don’t you agree?
It is not like you only have strengths, you have weaknesses too. If you concentrate only on your strengths then you’re missing out something big. Who knows maybe these weaknesses are what hindering your growth and causing customer churn. The only way to find out your weakness is your customers. When you reach out and find your weaknesses, work on them to improve your brand.
Understanding your weaknesses can help you in seeing a new side of you and open doors for new prospects or opportunities. Analyze your strengths and weaknesses at least every six months and check the progress you have and compare with peers in the industry to understand where and what you’re lacking. Work on your weaknesses to become your advantage. Who doesn’t make mistakes, right? But what separates you from the crowd is how you handle and make it right.
Turn before they churn
Analysing your mistakes will help you in reducing future customer churn. But you won’t get the lost customer back, right?
Wondering how to predict before a customer churns?
It is not that difficult if you pay close attention you can identify the customers at risk. One of the best hints to find out if your customer is in the process of churn is by checking their usage as they will not be using your product as much as they did previously.
Catch these early signs and come up with strategies to re-engage your customers. Don’t wait until a customer churns, take action when you see a customer losing interest in your brand. You can segment your audience based on their interests, actions, results, progress, etc. Segmentation will help you in sending targeted emails for your customers and put strategies in place to prevent customers from the churn.
Developments
Always stay at the top of new developments. It has the power to reduce customer churn.
Wondering how?
The changes in the law, rules, customer behaviour can affect your product. These changes can either have a positive or negative effect on your products. If you don’t pay attention you may end up losing customers.
The market is constantly changing, so it becomes your responsibility to stay at the top of them. Not only these, but there are also many technological changes that a business needs to consider. These developments can make your business easy and improve the quality of your products if you ignore them, your competitors may gain hold of your customers.
Competitors
Believe it or not, in a day hundreds of new businesses are taking birth across the globe. Thanks to globalization, selling has become easy even if you stay in a different country than your customers. The world has become one big market place. One single mistake of yours can gain your competitors a new customer.
So keep an eye on both your customers and competitors. You can analyse and understand how they’re conducting their business and acquiring their customers to understand what you’re missing out. Changing the behaviour of customers and choices available in the market have made it hard for businesses. If you keep a track of your competitors, you can understand their strategies as you both target the same audience base.
Conclusion
It has become quite hard to understand customers changing behaviour. But if you don’t keep up with these changes you may end up losing a customer. Which will do no good for your business, right? They even bring both revenue and potential customer to your business. Understand their preferences and if you find a customer at risk of churn, immediately work on strategies and other ways to re-engage them into your brand.