As Q4 approaches, chances are you see a lot of potential to improve your business. You might even have several concrete items in mind that you’d like to work on during the upcoming quarter. The only problem? You can’t take your company to the next level without the right know-how, and Q4 isn’t going to afford a lot of extra time for learning …
Luckily, with the help of this post, you can gain a quick understanding of a critical item that you need to address—customer churn. Every month customers stop doing business with your company, influencing your profits greatly. Fortunately, reducing customer churn by just five percent can increase your profits by 25 to 125 percent.
Below, you’ll learn more about why customer churn occurs and what your brand can do to eliminate it. Start Q4 with a sound customer churn elimination strategy and finish the year on a high note.
Why Churn Occurs
Before we get ahead of ourselves, what exactly is churn and how do I recognize it? For the purposes of this article, churn is simply the loss of clients or customers. If you’re unaware of your current churn rate, take the number of customers you lose every month and divide that number by your total customer base. For example, if you have 100 customers (with no incoming customers) and three customers leave each month, your churn rate is three percent. Ideally, most profitable and sustainable business models run on about five percent churn rate per month and this should be your goal.
Now that churn is clearly defined as the loss of clients and customers, it’s important to evaluate why consumers abandon companies. The most common reasons for customer churn are bad customer service, poor customer onboarding, inadequate customer nurturing, and natural causes. The important thing to note here is that three fourths of these are preventable on this company side. What are you doing to keep your customers happy?
Leverage Your Data
Once business leaders understand the serious nature of customer churn, they often try to eliminate it right away. Some scramble to find new customers to replace their losses; others start to pour money into their customer service centers.
It’s difficult to acknowledge a problem and not rush to fix it, but this is exactly what business leaders should do when it comes to customer churn. Instead of throwing potential fixes at the problem, business owners should develop informed approaches with the help of Big Data.
Tools To Attack Churn
If you really want to improve your customer churn rate, you’ll first need to understand exactly what’s causing your customers to leave your business. Luckily, data and analytics can help you understand the exact reasons for your customers’ abandonment.
When it comes to using Big Data to inform business actions, there are several tools that can help. One of which is Domo, a platform that’s designed to help you run your entire business from one platform. Domo has risen in popularity recently because it excels in connecting various source of information from across your organization.
Another tool that’s gaining a lot of traction is VisualCue. Like Domo, VisualCue’s all-in-one platform is designed to connect information from across an organization all in real-time. What’s unique about VisualCue, though, is how it displays said information. Instead of generating numerous spreadsheets and reports, VisualCue presents data in easy-to-understand, visual representations called, “Tiles.”
A Tile is comprised of an object of interest and its key attributes. Ultimately, the object of interest and its key performance indicators change color when they reach values outside of industry standards. This feature allows every individual in an organization to more quickly understand data than ever before.
Finally, Good Data is another top-tier platform you can use to understand customer churn. This organization tool excels in helping companies maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their customer service. They focus on this area because 86 percent of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience.
Plan to Put Data to Work
Once companies understand the impact losing customers has on their bottom line, they simply can’t afford to ignore the occurrence—especially as the busy fourth quarter approaches. Businesses such as yours need to gain a clear picture of why customers are leaving.
With the help of a data management platform, you can transform the data you already collect every day and use it to inform your customer retention strategy. The tools mentioned above will show you exactly why your customers are leaving so you can create a targeted plan to keep them within your book of business.
Making a change in any area of your business can be a big endeavor—especially when it concerns something as important as improving churn rates. Fortunately, with the right know-how and tool, you can start to make lasting changes that will improve your retention rates. Instead of rushing into a quick fix, take a step back, and leverage your data to create a working plan that’s devised from real-time insights.