Customer churn directly impacts profitability and is, therefore, an important metric for subscription businesses to track. According to Sixteen Ventures, ‘around 30% of SaaS providers have an unacceptable level of churn’ which can often have a devastating impact on overall business and profitability.
It is important to note that whilst some level of customer churn is to be expected for subscription-based organisations, it is highly important to monitor churn in case of a severe rise in churn cases. Understanding when and why you experience customer churn, can help to identify improvements to increase customer retention and improve overall business.
With Subscription Management Systems offering powerful tools to combat customer churn, it has never been easier to understand attrition rates and make businesses more efficient.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER CHURN?
Customer churn refers to the ratio of customers lost in a given period, usually a month or year, versus the number of customers present at the beginning of that period. Calculating the churn rates across a business is hugely beneficial for businesses to identify any areas for improvement, building efficiency, and ultimately pushing business growth.
Monitoring churn rates alongside customer acquisition rates and costs (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is clearly important – as when churn outweighs the other, the business is in trouble.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN CAUSES OF CUSTOMER CHURN?
To fully understand customer churn and identify areas for improvement, you must locate the main causes of why customers drop out of repurchasing. This can ultimately aid in building focused strategies to build a better structure around customer experience and the customer journey.
Involuntary Churn
Involuntary churn describes the process of losing customers based on payment failures that lead to subscription cancellation. This describes issues such as card declines due to expired cards, maxed-out credit cards, or suspected fraudulent activity.
Failures in card and banking systems can have a huge impact on customer service, especially if a customer did not want to cancel their subscription. This can have a devastating impact on customer churn, with poor customer service being the main cause of churn in customer renewal.
It can be incredibly frustrating to lose out on business due to issues beyond your control. However, with the right subscription management systems in place, you can prevent certain involuntary churn issues from taking place.
Subscription business can hugely benefit from integrated tools such as automated subscription billing emails which send reminders to customers about their upcoming payments. This helps to reduce churn rates and prevents customer retention for those customers with expiring bank cards.
Poor Customer Service
To identify potential problems in your customer experience, it is vital to review and, if necessary, re-evaluate your customer service. According to Forbes, customers who experience good customer service are five times more likely to purchase again, and four times more likely to recommend to a friend. Providing good customer service is hugely beneficial for both businesses and consumers and can heavily reduce churn rates over a given period.
Poor customer service can have devastating effects on SaaS businesses that rely on renewed subscriptions to create a profit. Not only can poor customer service hugely affect profitability, but in the modern tech world, bad customer service can lead to a sprout of bad press across social media, increasing the devastation on overall business growth. Providing customers with good customer service helps businesses to build a trusted brand ultimately leading to a reduction in customer churn rates.
To gain a better understanding of customer experience, organisations can benefit from subscription management tools that offer powerful features to prevent customer retention. Make each customer feel important with personalised in-app notifications and contextual emails to increase customer engagement and discover which customer service experiences, or points in the customer journey, lead to churn.
Low-Value Services or Value Misalignment
Another lead cause of customer churn is value misalignment. This describes the action where a customer believes the service purchased does not offer the value they expected. Customers who believe they are not getting high value from the products they are buying are, of course, less likely to return or re-purchase.
Reassessing your value proposition to ensure services and customer expectations are aligned is a rewarding task in terms of reducing customer churn.
REDUCING CUSTOMER CHURN WITH CHARGEBEE
Reducing customer churn rates is made simple with Chargebee. Rated #1 subscription management system by G2, Chargebee offers a variety of powerful features to reduce involuntary churn rates, missed payments, and subscription cancellations.
Chargebee has successfully recovered 75% of potentially lost revenue. This has ultimately led to an improvement in financial stability for subscription businesses and has massively improved customer experience, reducing churn in more ways that one.
Chargebee offers a variety of tools to help businesses prevent customer churn. Segmentation functionality allows Chargebee users to assess customer drop off points, by segmenting customers into different groups, giving an overall better understanding of which customers drop off at which points.
In addition, users can utilise or test promotion credits and coupons throughout the buyer journey to provide a better value and experience to customers. These powerful tools can help businesses to reduce customer churn by identifying drop-off points sooner and at every point in the customer journey.
Trusted by over 20,000 businesses, Chargebee offers complete subscription lifecycle management, handling recurring billing, customers, and prices all from one platform. This alignment of business can help to reduce churn, with the ability to recognise areas for improvement quickly. Chargebee can also be integrated with your CRM system, payment getaways, and support systems to allow for complete visibility of business, from lead to ledger.
As verified partners of Chargebee, ION work with businesses to unleash subscription and billing transformation.
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