10 Reasons for Customer Churn That Your Company Needs to Address

The idea that companies must focus on customer retention has become so entrenched that entrepreneurs avoid taking any risks, especially when it comes to customer experiences.

 

But have modern business owners really cracked the code to put a full stop to customer churn?

 

According to a study, 54% of all consumers globally say they have higher customer service expectations than they did just one year ago. This reflects the current state of customer expectations that are rising well-above the service-set offered by the majority of brands and businesses today.

While customer engagement and delivering delightful customer journeys continue to drive the agenda of all the business organizations, one of the topics that need adequate attention is ‘Customer Churn’.

But what is customer churn in the first place? It is the percentage of customers that stopped using a company’s services or products in a specific time frame. More churn means less customer retention and eventually, a sinking business.

Let us now see some leading reasons that make customers switch to other brands.


So What Are the Top Reasons for Customer Churn?

Experts believe that customer churn is inevitable. Sooner or later, you will have customers leaving your business due to a single reason or a combination of many.      Take a look at some of the top reasons for customer churn.

Image Source: Statista

The above graph reveals that customer churn happens primarily when customer expectations are not met regarding product quality and service experiences.

Now, let’s get to the meat of this blog, where we will learn about the top reasons for customer churn, how to improve your retention rate, and how to keep your customers loyal for a long time.

 

Let us start with the root of customer churn - Customer Experience!


Customer Experiences - Ever-evolving, Challenging, Mutating, and Channel-agnostic

The modern-day business landscape is ever-evolving, and new entrants make it even more challenging by offering solutions for life problems instead of just selling their products.

New business models are agile, hyper-sensitive to data, and mutate with the needs of customers.

Hence, customer churn!

But why do customers leave brands they adore? What makes a customer say good-bye to a brand they used for years? Is going over-the-top the only way to keep your customers? And, what are some expert ways to keep your customers engaged, delighted, and loyal?

Let us explore answers to all these questions one-by-one.


Reasons for Customer Churn and Expert Solutions for All of Them

Reason 1: Lack of Personalization

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The customers no longer want to browse through the entire catalog. They prefer browsing a specific section and love to get a personalized catalog delivered in their inboxes. Lacking personalized support, shopping experiences, and personalized service set can lead to demotivated customers. Impersonal customer experience is one of the top reasons for customer churn. As personalization relies on customer-specific data, most business owners tend to overlook it while planning to reduce customer churn.

Solution:

Personalized customer experiences can work wonders for every business. Design and curate personalized customer experiences that can walk that extra mile for your customers. Sending personalized product catalogs will show that you understand the shopping habits of your customers. Curate personalized discounts, promotional offers and make them an offer they simply cannot refuse.

Reason 2: Reluctance to Adopt Automation

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Technological disruption and automation are currently driving a major number of global business agendas. The above screenshot gives a sneak-peek into various areas where business organizations are using AI. Without automation, it is impossible to get deep analytics about your customers, their behavior, and motivation. Automation plays a key role in personalization as well. However, your reluctance to adopt automation might land you in the circle of obsolete businesses that are no longer relevant to the futuristic market.

Solution:

Start with an in-depth study of your business, its deliverables, customer bases, and recent trends. Figure out the areas and processes that you can improve by adopting automation. Invest in quality solutions for sure-shot success, instead of mindless investments and integrations that prove drainage of resources. Automation helps you accomplish more in less time and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction via the proficient and fool-proof understanding of customer behavior.


Reason 3: Faulty Customer Support

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Most of the businesses fail to establish, recognize, and nurture a healthy relationship with their customers. They fail to deliver and perform across the above-mentioned six pillars of customer support. This not only demotivates them, but it also makes them disengaged with your brand, which is again one of the vital reasons for customer churn. Failure to be available on all public channels, failure to deliver the right support as and when required, and failure to deliver your promises drive your customers away forever.

Solution:

Invest time, effort, and resources to listen to your customers and that too wherever and whenever they want. Show that you care by offering humanistic support and deliver your promises by reaching out to them after query resolution. Smart customer support software such as ProProfs Help Desk can help you deliver impeccable customer support, reduce ticket volume by 80%, offer self-help modules, swift replies via canned responses, and actionable insights via reports, etc. So, invest in such tools to take your customer support to the next level.


Reason 4: Inability to Understand Customer Behavior

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Every business owner must invest time and effort in regular pulse-check to understand his customers' current engagement levels. A thoughtfully compiled survey can help you do the job with finesse and offers deep insights into customer behavior. Failure to recognize the first signs of customer behavior and motivation is a harbinger of impending doom and boosts customer churn rate.

Solution:

Do a Customer Satisfaction Survey for a smart and intuitive pulse-check of your customers. Invest in smart tools that can help you see the customer activities on your website, their exit intentions, reasons for unsubscribing and heat maps. A thorough understanding of customer behavior helps you devise a customer-savvy strategy that can reduce customer churn.


Reason 5: Failure to deliver Humanistic Support

Many brands fail to realize that a ruthless inclination towards automation can have adverse effects on their customers. As shown in the above image, there are various humanistic sentiments to best customer support that must be reflected in a brand’s operations. No one wants to pour out his grievances to an emotion-less bot that can only respond with canned responses. Further, societal responsibilities, welfare initiatives, and emotional intelligence are some of the must-haves for an impeccable support system.

Solution:

The only way to ace the game of automation is to balance it well with human resources. After careful consideration, curate a suite of tools, technology, and human resources so that both the automated and humanistic support are in equilibrium. Remember, as important as it is to have a futuristic business model, it is important to have a customer-savvy support system.


Reason 6: Mundane Onboarding Process

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Failure to offer a great onboarding program along with your SaaS product will lead to misinformed customers that are clueless about your services, customer support channels, and even the entire feature-set of your product. Orchestrated onboarding ensures customer engagement and customer validation. A smart and intuitive survey can help you find out whether your customers know about all the product feature or not, and a lot more things. Based on these insights, you can devise a great onboarding experience for them.

Solution:

User onboarding is an essential ingredient for customer success in every business domain. A pulse-check or survey can help you find all the areas where you lack in terms of user onboarding. Devise the onboarding program after careful consideration of all the analytics and reports you get from the survey to offer all the information to customers right from the start.


Reason 7: Poor or Obsolete Marketing Techniques

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The above screenshot shows various verticals of marketing in the modern-day business environment. So, if you are still thinking along the traditional marketing lines, now is the time to revise your marketing strategies.. Poor marketing is as harmful as faulty marketing and obsolete marketing and is one of the primary reasons for customer churn. Emotional intelligence and behavioral segmentation of customers and users are some techniques that can help you devise a futuristic marketing strategy.

Solution:

Rethink your marketing strategy such that your brand story is directed to the consumers and users. Having crystal clear brand projections helps establish the right image in the minds of consumers and does an incredible job of self-promotion. Further, working consistently on your marketing manifesto brings unprecedented gains and keeps the customers engaged.


Reason 8: Bugs that don’t go Away

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If there were no bugs in software, your life as a programmer would be awesome, and your customers would be eternally loyal. Sadly, this rarely happens, right? Bugs are common, and many of them can be instantaneously removed. However, recurring bugs that are similar or different in nature, the inability of your team to remove them, or ignoring the incoming reports altogether can drive your customers away.

Solution:

Bugs in a software product are inevitable, and every user understands that. However, failure to tackle them properly, well-in-time, and removing them for once and all are some of the top reasons for customer churn. As soon as you get a report, you must ensure proper and timely action, which must be followed by a proactive response from the support team to the reporting customer.


Reason 9: Failure to deliver Delightful Customer Journeys

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Leaders in customer experiences focus on the entire customer journeys instead of independent experience touchpoints. This offers them better control over the customer lifecycle and transforms the customer trajectory as well. Many brands fail to realize that delivering happiness across the entire customer journey is better and more fruitful than singular experiences that can be easily replaced. This costs them valuable customers.

Solution:

Focus on the entire customer journey. Don’t think that once you have made a sale, the customer-related duties are over, or once you have resolved a query, you no longer need to be in touch with your customers. Acquire a new customer, make a sale, resolve the issues, personalize their services or products or plans, nurture them with personalized experiences, and go beyond mundane newsletters to ensure that they remain engaged. Operationalize customer experiences across people, technology, and processes for a strong relationship with your customers.


Reason 10: Ignoring the Data-digs

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One of the biggest reasons for customer churn is the inability to utilize data collected overtime via surveys, reports, tools, and insightful software. Business organizations have hoards of data now. However, most of them are still clueless about the way it should be used. Further, many organizations don’t know how to utilize data collected from random sources to gain insights into their customers. This amounts to customer frustration and demotivation as they don’t get to see the results even after active participation in surveys etc.

Solution:

Collect data, analyze it, aggregate customer data collected from different sources, and if human resources don’t suffice, invest in AI and ML-based tools to do the job. Looking into this data gives you the actual peek into customer stats and their satisfaction levels. Finally, work on it and share the improvements and their results with the entire customer base to make them feel valued.

 

Final Thoughts!

We all have customers who buy once and then completely disappear off our accounts receivable. Retaining hard-earned customers is the critical benchmark of any company's long-term success.

Just remember that there would always be another business that comes up with lucrative offers and drives your customers away. However, understanding the above reasons and implementing their respective solutions will surely help you extend the customer journey with your brand.

We hope you were able to draw thoughtful takeaways from this discussion. Thanks for reading!

About the author

Jared Cornell is a customer-support specialist, a marketing evangelist and a book lover, associated with ProProfs Help Desk. Jared is passionate about customer support and loves to solve customers’ queries. He is always keen to develop new strategies to help customers seeking Help Desk assistance for a delightful experience.

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