How to reduce customer attrition in 4 simple steps!

Today, customer attrition is a concern for most businesses at one point or another. Understanding it and implementing the right strategies to reduce customer attrition is key for future growth.

While the number of customers fluctuates in all business sectors, companies offering long-term services with subscription payments, such as SaaS software publishers or telecom operators, are the most affected.

But, how to calculate customer attrition? How should it be interpreted? And how to reduce customer churn?

Discover all of our tips and recommended tools on customer attrition to improve your marketing strategy!

Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, is the loss of customers or clients.

To measure customer attrition, it is recommended to use a customer attrition rate which is a marketing indicator used to get the percentage of customers or subscribers that have stopped using your product or service over a given period.

Measuring customer churn rates is a fundamental step in analyzing your company's ability to retain customers. And, it will give you information about the general health of your business and the match between market expectations and the features of your product or service.

When calculating your customer churn rate, it is important to distinguish customers who leave you by choice and those who leave by force.

Customer attrition is voluntary when the customer decides to stop purchasing your product or service. This may be because he no longer has a need for it or he decided to purchase it from a competitor.

Customer attrition can also be involuntary. This is when customers leave due to factors beyond your control (e.g., they go out of business).

Measuring customer attrition is useful for companies that offer products or services in the form of a subscription (with recurring payment) such as telecom providers or SaaS publishers.

Customer retention is a key issue for them because they are faced with the highest attrition rates among all industries.

Today, the leading causes of customer attrition are:

© Relently

During an onboarding, customers interact with your team and this is where you can make the first positive impact.

They pay for your product or service because they want it to solve a problem for them. If you take too long to show results, they might look for a better alternative.

It is important to maintain a healthy relationship with your customers. The key is to show them that you are listening to their needs and that you are constantly providing bespoke solutions to solve their problems.

If you do not take care of your customers, someone else will.

To prevent this from becoming a deal-breaker, and driving your customers away from your service, you need to offer fast, responsive customer support.

Relying on a Key Performance Indicator is helpful, but not sufficient. If you collect data, it is mainly to monitor its evolution. Evaluating your company's attrition rate will allow you to identify the reasons why customers switch to the competition and prevent churn.

It is by measuring that you learn... and take the lead!

Moreover, by identifying your customer attrition rate, you will be able to detect possible weaknesses and find correct actions to implement to improve your solution.

The customer attrition rate also indicates the extent to which the volatility of your customer base affects your sales.

Since the cost of acquiring a new customer is higher than the cost of retaining one, it may be more worthwhile to focus on customer retention to secure your revenue in the long term.

Therefore, the loyalty program for b2b customers should be an asset that you take advantage of since he is likely to purchase more and recommend your brand to others. 

First, quantify the following information:

• the number of customers lost during a given period
• the number of customers at the beginning of the given time period

Then, divide the number of customers lost by the total number of clients over a given period and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage:

Here is an example:

To calculate turnover rates for a company that had 650 customers at the beginning of the month and 600 customers at the end of the month, the attrition rate formula would be:

• Number of customers lost: 650 – 600 = 50 customers
• Number of customers at the beginning of the period: 650
• Attrition rate formula: 50/650 = .0769 or 7.7%

Gathering this data can be more complex when you are selling a product or service that does not involve repeat purchases or subscriptions. Indeed, it is easier to obtain the number of people that have terminated a contract than it is to identify those who repeat purchases.

Calculating NPS is also a good method to know your customer satisfaction. 

It is generally recommended to not have an attrition rate of more than 10%. However, this number depends on your product or service and your industry, and it can be much higher for some companies, without being a potential danger.

Adopting or reinforcing a customer-centric approach may be one of the best techniques to promote customer retention. Therefore, you should focus on improving customer experience to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Here are 4 steps to reduce customer attrition:

To analyze your customer attrition more accurately, segment your customer base, and identify the most profitable customers. You will then be able to take actions adapted to different groups of customers that have similar expectations or characteristics (budget, habits, channels used...), to increase their satisfaction.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the perfect tool to do this with. It allows you to segment your customer base, develop marketing or persona profiles, and follow the entire customer life cycle, from prospect to loyal customer.

There are several types of relevant data that you can collect, this includes:

• customer sales engagement
• psychography (opinions, interests, etc.)
• behavior
• interactions with the brand in a given environment and on the communication channels used (chatbots, social media, hotline, etc.)

This data can be analyzed to have a better understanding of the expectations and purchasing behaviors of your targets.

Likewise, it is possible to directly ask for their opinion, with surveys and questionnaires, by using tools such as Qualtrics.

© Rewards genius

Customers are very sensitive to the quality of their interactions with a brand. Improving your response time limits the number of unsatisfied customers that could spread negative impressions about you to others.

Moreover, a customer engagement platform such as RingCentral Engage Digital is ideal to improve the management of your digital communications, and not miss any opportunity to answer a customer or prospect.

This solution is perfect for telecom companies since there is a high attrition rate in that industry, sometimes as high as 30%. By using RingCentral Engage, you can cover all digital channels and improve customer service by answering your customers, wherever they are.

Reinforcing customer relations requires personalized features and messages. To do this, you can create workflows adapted to your targets by following each step of the conversion funnel.

This can be achieved with the help of customer success and support platform FROGED. It was designed to improve your client support and retention by customizing events, tracking customer behavior, launching product updates, and so much more. Moreover, the platform offers you an annual churn calculator which will help you calculate your annual as well as monthly client and profit losses. The program will also show you the possible turnover in case of a correct onboarding implementation

With a CRM or marketing automation solution, you can set up different automated scenarios, focusing on each of the key moments of the customer's purchasing journey to ensure you send the right message to the right target at the right time.

via GIPHY

Finally, track your metrics to study the impact of your marketing actions and observe the evolution of the attrition rate over time. This will allow you to gain insights to improve your marketing campaigns for customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty.

Now that we have provided you with all of the right tools to reduce your customer attrition, what will be your first step towards customer retention?

Article modified on 11/23/2020