Reduce Churn

Customer churn is the moment when a customer stops using a service. The higher the customer churn rate, the lower the chances of your business succeeding.

Research by Bain & Company found that a mere 5% increase in customer retention increases overall profits by 25 to 95%. You have to avoid having your customers churn at all costs, so that customer retention rates can rise.

This checklist will help you analyze customer outreach, customer ticket engagement, and social media interaction. After that, you will reflect on the successes and downfalls of your processes to reduce churn. 

Remind yourself of the churn formula by inputting a definition in the text field.

Measuring churn can be done by using the churn formula. Adam Henshall, a content writer at Process Street, has written a post thoroughly explaining churn, churn rate, and churn formulas. 

So that you remember what churn formula is, write a definition of it.

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Record the company’s current churn rate by following the formula used in the previous step (3).

Figuring out your current churn rate will help you compare what’s going well and what’s not going well. When this checklist is launched again in the following months, the information can be used comparatively.

Define the churn reduction goal you want to aim for by noting it in the form field below.

Setting yourself a churn reduction goal will help to make that goal a reality. The churn reduction goal will change each time, depending on how much or how little you want to reduce churn by.

The tasks in this next section are directly related to marketing. Assign your marketing manager to tasks 7-12, so they can input the required information.

To learn more about Process Street’s useful assigning feature, read more by clicking this link to our Help site.

Review the welcome email by using the subtask checklist below.

One of the first forms of contact your customers will see is your welcome email. Considering how important it is, reviewing it is essential.

The email should:

• Not contain old information or dead links
• The content should be relevant to the customer
• The customer should feel that the email is personalized and not generic
• The welcome email should increase engagement between customers and company.

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Analyze your follow-up emails to make sure they’re updated, relevant, feel personalized to the user, and increases engagement.

The emails sent after the initial welcome email are crucial for establishing customer engagement and retention. The same criteria you used to review the welcome email should be used to review the follow-up emails.

Consider if new and long-time users alike are being engaged enough via email.

A lack of communication between the company and the customer results in the customer forgetting about the company‘s existence. Consider if the marketing team could do with upping the number of emails they send out to both new and long-time customers.

Look at the survey distribution rate to ensure they’re pushed out regularly.

A tremendous way of gathering information regarding your company and how customers feel toward the company is via feedback surveys. Considering their usefulness, they should be pushed out on a regular but not overwhelming basis.

Input the main feedback points from user surveys into the form field underneath.

By looking through an array of feedback surveys, there should be general points made by customers. For instance, maybe a group of people suggested improving the website’s user experience. Find these main feedback points and list them. Listing them will provide useful information to reduce churn.

Review the output of content like training sessions, webinars, and blog posts to make sure they’re regularly scheduled.

The content your team releases plays a pivotal role in engaging the customers, helping retention rates, and immobilizing churn. So by reviewing the content output schedule, you can see if they’re being regularly released or not. Tick the subtasks off if that type of content is being released regularly.

For tips on building a blog and writing blog posts, check out this post by Process Street CEO Vinay Patankar for Duct Tape Marketing.

The tasks in the ticket engagement section are for the customer service manager. So that the tasks can be completed by them, assign them to tasks 14-19.

For more information regarding the assigning feature, our Help site has an information guide.

Review the information and the articles in the knowledge base.

A knowledge base or help site is the place where customers go to figure out issues themselves. If they can’t use the help site or the information they’re seeing doesn’t sort out their problem, they’re far likelier to churn. 

By having an up-to-date and helpful knowledge base to refer to, your customers will be more satisfied.

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Check support response time in case customers aren’t being responded to quickly enough.

Customers don’t like being ignored. Neither do like they having to wait hours upon hours for an answer to their question or issue. Reduce churn by checking that customers are being responded to quickly.

Find the peak ticket times for each day of the week by noting them below.

Tickets flood in during certain hours according to the timezone(s) your team works in. Find these peak times for each day in the week and note them below.

Ensure enough customer support staff are available during peak times.

Now that you’ve gotten to grips with peak ticket times, focus on ensuring that there are enough people working at those times to deal with the tickets. Having two customer support members working during peak times might not be enough if you’re receiving a support ticket every two minutes.

Guarantee off-peak times are covered by staff.

The customer support team should be ready to tackle customer issues at all times. That being said, during off-peak times, not as many staff are needed. Look at the staff rota to guarantee off-peak times are covered too, but to a lesser degree.

Consider recruiting new CS employees if there’s a shortage of people.

If it has become noticeable there’s not enough staff to handle the number of tickets coming in, consider recruiting new employees. The customer support team already have their hands full – by not helping lighten their workload, not only can customers churn, but the support team can suffer from burnout.

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Depending on your company and company size, either the CS manager or marketing manager will cover this. Assign the appropriate staff member to tasks 21-25 for completion.

Look at what the public is saying about your company online.

Your company needs to sustain its reputation. By using applications such as Mention, companies can keep track of their online presence.

If there are overlapping comments or points being made by people – positive or negative – paste them in the box below to keep a record. What they’re saying could be invaluable feedback.

Respond to negative reviews before they play a factor in other customers churning.

Negative reviews have an astonishingly negative overall impact. The team at Dimensional Research has found that the majority of millennials in the study – 86% of them – have their decisions influenced by negative reviews. 

Diminish the impact a negative review has by launching our How to Respond to Negative Reviews checklist.

Review the current social media triage to ensure the public is being interacted with enough.

Using a visual social media triage chart is a great way of seeing the steps taken to respond (or not respond) to social media comments and mentions. However, a social media triage’s flow might need changing to garner better results.

Look to see if the social media triage chart could be improved to reduce churn.

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Edit the current triage flow to have more customer interaction.

In the text box below, write down the changes that could be made to help improve flow and reduce customer churn – i.e. responding to all comments and mentions, no matter if they’re legitimate or not.

Analyze incentive promotions to make sure there are promotions are rolling out.

Incentives such as discount codes, free trials, trial extensions, and freebies such as eBooks will help the customer feel they’re getting more for their time and/or money. With this in mind and with regular promotion, it’s a great way to help reduce churn.

Note the success your company has had in combatting churn over the last month.

Now that the checklist has nearly been completed, you should have a good idea of what successes there has been. 

Consider what must be changed to reduce churn rate going forward.

Unless you have a churn rate of zero, there are always ways to reduce customer churn. After completing the above tasks and seeing how certain processes and actions related to retention and churn can be improved, note the potential improvements down.

Schedule the next checklist for the end of next month.

This checklist is to be completed on a monthly basis, preferably at the end of each month. By running it multiple times over the year, you can accurately track and reduce churn. 

Scheduling checklists is easy with Process Street. Follow the steps mentioned in this easy-to-read post on our Help site.

• Frederick F. Reichheld & Phil Schefter – The Economics of E-Loyalty 
• Nextiva – 100 Essential Customer Service Statistics and Trends for 2019
• Vinay Patankar – How to Build a Blog with 100,000+ Monthly Page Views
• Andrew Tate – How To Calculate Customer Churn Rate (+ The Best SaaS Churn Formula)
• Andrew Tate – How To Reduce Churn By Building A Bulletproof Retention Process
• Dimensional Research – Customer Service And Business Results: A Survey Of Customer Service From Mid-Size Companies
• Jeremiah Owyang – Breakdown: Social Media Workflow, Process, Triage
• David Armano – Community Management Scenario Map
• Chris Syme – 3 Reasons Why You Need a Social Media Response Triage
• Carly Stec – How to Reduce Customer Churn: 7 Helpful Tips to Try
• Zarema Plaksij – Customer Churn: 12 Ways to Stop Churn Immediately
• Adam Henshall – What is Churn Rate? How to Calculate Customer Churn (Definition + Meaning)

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