When it comes to running a business, particularly a SaaS company, understanding churn is vital.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s cut straight to the chase.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is churn?
• How to calculate churn rate
• Churn examples: From Facebook to Twitter to HubSpot
• Why do customers churn?
• McKinsey’s 4 best practices to increase retention rates 15%
• 3 practical steps to reduce churn in your business
• The Harvard churn management algorithm
• Churn management resources to help you reduce churn
• Use Process Street to help you tackle churn in your business

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“We’re here for YOU“, the sign in front of me mocked as I waited my 22nd minute in line at the local store. We could all hear the staff chatting in a back room (a team-wide “lunch break”), discussing the weather while the rest of us silently fumed.

It’s horrible when a business doesn’t put their customers first.

That’s the problem that an omnichannel approach is designed to solve.

Following up from Whitney Blankenship‘s post about omnichannel marketing in e-commerce, we here at Process Street decided to tackle the subject as a whole and show what it means to be an omnichannel business in action.

From theme parks to banks, we’ve got a little of everything. Before all that though, there’s something we need to get straight…

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There are so many layers to a modern support team.

Some companies will have countless reps working hard each day to champion the customer and empower them to do what they need to do.

On top of that, you might have members of the support team who double up as part of the product design team; looking for niche use cases or areas where customers don’t find the product intuitive.

Support teams may even have specialized roles which look to help customers achieve certain business goals, rather than just guidance with the software.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at one of the unsung specialists of the modern age: the customer support engineer.

With the rise of SaaS products particularly, the customer support engineer has become a meeting point for customers, sales, design, and development.

A Jack or Jill of all trades!

We’re going to explore exactly what a customer support engineer is, what they do, and when or why you might need one!

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The following is a guest post submission from Federico Pascual, co-founder and COO of MonkeyLearn.

Customer feedback doesn’t just come in through your site’s contact form – it’s everywhere.

You only have to search the Twitter handle of any product with more than a few hundred users to see that customers love to offer their opinion – positive and negative. It’s useful to be monitoring this and learning from it, but casually collecting feedback on an ad-hoc basis isn’t enough.

Startups thrive on feedback as their ‘North star’, and are constantly evolving based on what their customers request, break, and complain about. Enterprises also can’t overlook the fact that customers are what make any company tick, and must struggle harder than startups to stay relevant and innovate.

So, if you’re just collecting feedback ‘as and when’ it comes in, you’re missing out on data that’s just as important as page views or engagement. It’s like deciding not to bother setting up Google Analytics on your homepage, or not properly configuring your CRM; in the end, you’re deciding to not benefit from data that will have a transformative effect on your product strategy.

With a dataset of feedback – whether that’s from customer reviews, support tickets, or social media – you can dig into the words your customers are using to describe certain parts of your product and get insights into what they like, and what they don’t like. In this post, I’m going to show you how.

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It feels like certain areas of tech are booming at the moment.

Everyone and their nan seem to be incorporating the blockchain into their startup pitches, voice interface devices are sweeping the globe, and chatbots are popping up left right and center.

It feels like part of the rise of chatbots is predicated on the long term potential behind the idea of a smart assistant who can effectively communicate by chat. But the reality of a proper AI assistant is still some distance away.

Nonetheless, chatbots have real world uses already. For some use cases, chatbots are proving to be an effective and affordable alternative to previous practices.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What are chatbots good for?
• How KLM boosted customer interaction 40% with chatbots
• What we do at Process Street with Intercom’s chatbot features
• How to set up a simple chatbot with Chatfuel
• 7 chatbot tools to check out today

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My doctor has the worst phone setup I’ve ever encountered.

Wait times are 30+ minutes, the phones are completely clogged after 10 am, and worst of all is the hold music.

A deafening din of distorted notes which at one point may have resembled “Clocks” by Coldplay. If it wasn’t for my own health, I would happily put the phone down and never ring them again.

However, unless you’re as vital to lives as a doctor, your callers won’t stand for the same treatment.

You need a solid game plan. The best hold music you can get your hands on. You need to entertain and hold their interest while they wait for someone to have the time to deal with their problems, or you can kiss that customer goodbye.

That’s exactly what this post will help you to do.

Read on to find out:

• Why you need the best hold music you can get
• Where hold music started
• How different music affects our emotions
• How to structure your hold system
• Some tips to get the most out of your phone system

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Throughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

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The following is a guest post from Sam Suthar, the CMO of Acquire.

Scaling your business is almost impossible until you know your customer’s value. Whether you’re going to scale a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, it doesn’t matter; it’s vitally important to understand what each customer is worth to your business.

Statistics by Unicom Group show that 50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. Sadly, this number can increase if you fail to understand what the customer who signed up last night is worth.

Can you reduce your churn and increase customer retention rate?

Yes, it’s doable. Although very tricky. In the rest of this article, I will show you how to scale your business by first knowing the value of each customer.

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The essential customer success book to boost MRR at your SaaS company

A SaaS company without a customer success system is like a lion without teeth. You can chase customers all you like, but when you catch them you’re thinking “now what?”.

If you haven’t got a customer success team or set of processes in place at your SaaS company, it’s bad but not the end of the world.

Some SaaS companies are more self-serve than others, but all need a way to retain important customers and start exponentially compounding revenue.

This book for putting the systems in place to retain customers, whether that’s by learning about their problems or by properly onboarding them.

Better yet, it’s completely free.

What’s in the ebook?

• What is Customer Success?
• Why is Customer Success Important?
• What is Churn?
• How to Calculate NPS with the Perfect Customer Happiness Survey
• How to Shape Customer Retention Strategies That Beat Churn
• A Smart Way to Manage SaaS Customer Support
• Enhance Your SaaS User Experience
• How (and When) to Automate Your Customer Success Process
• What Customer Success Managers Actually Do All Day

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Customer success has the unique distinction of being both the #1 driver of revenue retention in SaaS companies and SaaS companies’ best kept secret. According to Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, customer success is where 90% of revenue is. For such an important topic, though, the dialogue around customer success is terrible.

Most conversations about customer success tend to be very high-level, with little in the way of concrete, actionable advice. Too many think pieces, not enough case studies. With this in mind, we thought we’d take a different approach to the topic.

We talked to 5 SaaS companies whose customer success processes have lead to sustained growth, reduced churn, and improved customer relationships, and we asked them a simple question: What is the one tool your customer success strategy could not do without?
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