We all know that acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive than retaining an old one, and companies are well-advised to focus on existing customer relationships before they venture into new terrain. Indeed, industry estimates suggest that preventing churn can save you as much as 5X times costs than trying to replace an old customer with a new one. Contact centres are uniquely positioned to detect churn risk before they become an issue and prevent relationships from becoming sour. Here’s how.
Tips for Reducing Churn Rate in Your Contact Centre
Customer churn refers to the total number of customers that have shifted away from your brand in a given period. A steadily growing churn rate is a definite red flag and must be addressed by:
- Using speech analytics – Flag keywords indicating dissatisfaction such as “never” or “but.” Initiate follow-up calls, emails, personalised promotions, etc., to rekindle engagement
- Conducting feedback surveys – Collect customer feedback on specific aspects of the purchase experience like shipping times, packaging, support, etc., to pinpoint issues
- Expanding the channel presence – Presence on different channels can aid brand recall and give customers another place for interacting with your company. It also helps keep up with changing customer behaviour and collect 360-degree feedback
- Fine-tuning your contact centre scripts – Small script alterations show customers that you care about them, and can be very effective in maintaining loyalty levels
- Improving self-service – An easy-to-use self-service portal directly improves the customer’s experience with your product, making it less likely for them to switch
- Revisiting the onboarding process – New customer onboarding is often the best place to lay the foundations of strong, churn-proof relationships
- Mapping the customer journey – Customer journey mapping will reveal exactly where a customer decided to drop off and which CX element sparked the decision
These tips will equip you with sufficient information so that you can now course-correct, improving your customer experience, product, and channel journey for maximum engagement.
State of Customer Churn in Enterprises Today
Across B2B and B2C enterprises, customer retention and preventing churn is a top priority. 40% of companies are looking to improve their renewal or retention rate in 2021, while 20% are focused on mitigating the loss from customer churn. Interestingly, just 3% consider NPS to be an important metric in the context of customer churn, despite loyalty being a determining factor for switching brands.
Some of the ways in which companies plan on reducing churn and improving retention are:
- Customer loyalty programs (17%)
- Analytics to track the reason for product/service cancellation (14%)
- Automated workflows to guide customer renewal (14%)
- Expanding the channel presence to engage customers (11%)
- Improving the customer onboarding process (10%)
- Churn prediction technology to identify high-risk customers (10%)
That last element can prove extremely useful for tackling churn in a profitable way. Churn prediction technology can identify high-risk customers, and by correlating this data with customer lifetime value, you can pinpoint the precise target for your engagement efforts.
