Customer churn is the percentage of customers that left or stopped using your company’s services in a period of time. Organisations should aim for a churn rate that is as low as possible and treat it as a top priority.
Keeping your churn rate low will maximise revenue and help to build brand trust.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the best way to reduce customer churn. Different elements of your CRM can contribute in different ways; we’ve put together a list of the top 7.
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enable.services are a leading CRM provider with extensive experience in helping companies to retain customers. With a range of CRM solutions, we take pride in understanding your requirements fully and advising on the best platform for your business.
1. Use reporting to analyse why customer churn occurs
Understanding the cause of customer churn allows you to work on the areas that need improvement. With a powerful CRM, you can visualise data to show which customers have left, their reason to leave, and any other metric which is important to your business.
With advanced reporting and intuitive dashboards, you can pinpoint your customers’ problems which in turn makes it easier for you to coordinate resources accordingly.
2. Improve service
Arguably the most important way of improving customer retention and reducing customer churn is improving your core service.
Excellent customer service is crucial, and your CRM is a key part in contributing to the provision of that.
Having a customer service-focused CRM means that you can:
- Save time for your customers and support agents by providing a built-in self service knowledge portal
- Automatically route cases to relevant departments, teams, and employees depending on priority, time constraints, and category
- Allow your team to see their cases and all related information in a few clicks
- Get a clear overview of all service activities to understand how your team is performing
3. Show your customers that you care
Providing valuable, tailored communication and content for your clients is key in reducing customer churn.
Not only will they feel valued, but they will also know that your business cares about them as a customer and is willing to go the extra mile.
Using your CRM to provide personalised communication is easy; everything is tracked and logged, so you can see all customer interactions and activities.
For example, if you can see that a customer has been viewing a specific product page on your website, and has been opening marketing emails about the product, you can provide tailored communication by mentioning it at your next account management meeting.
You can also provide tailored support and help for their specific product or service; saying that you saw an eBook that your marketing team have created which made you think of them will allow the customer to know that you are thinking about their needs individually.
4. Gather feedback proactively
Did you know that 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, and 91% of those will leave and never come back?
With this in mind, it’s important to gauge your customers’ thoughts on your service. Knowing exactly what your areas of improvement are gives you the greatest opportunity to better them.
Using survey plugins and integrations with your CRM allows you to gather unbiased feedback from your customers. You can map this information directly into your system so that the data can be analysed and transformed into a customer satisfaction strategy.
Using your CRM for this makes sending out surveys and feedback emails easy, with simple segmentation to ensure that each customer is receiving targeted questioning.
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5. Analyse customer engagement
Engaged customers are less likely to churn, and are more likely to interact with you as a supplier. So, it’s important to see which clients are engaged with your communications to predict customer churn.
A great way of seeing engagement is through scoring. With a CRM marketing automation integration, you can visually see that a higher score equals more engagement. This score can be based on emails read, white papers downloaded, web pages visited, or any metric that matters. This then allows for easy reporting to identify which customers are churning.
Not only this, but it also lets you see which customers could be open to other products or services.
Learn more about engagement scoring with a CRM marketing platform integration by speaking to our team.
6. Create and manage processes for churning customers
Automation and document management in a CRM allows you to configure and organise processes for churning customers.
This means that when you are notified that a customer is thinking of cancelling, leaving, or not renewing, you can follow a strategised process that gives you the best possible chance of keeping that customer on board. Team members can automatically be assigned tasks to schedule meetings, approvals can be instantly sent for pricing reviews, and persuasive emails can be sent.
This is all thanks to a fully comprehensive, dynamic CRM.
7. Offer longer contracts to prevent customer churn
Allowing your customers to take out longer contracts for your services impacts customer churn rate positively. It means that they are your customer for longer, and so you can use this to build and maintain relationships.
Book in time with our team to discover our CRM with a built-in renewals console – so instead of setting countless reminders to forecast renewals and negotiate prices, let the platform do the work for you.
