This week:
ARTICLE: My 5-Point Emergency Churn Strategy
UPCOMING EVENT!: Live Debate > Did CS Run It's Course?
RESEARCH: There Can Never Be Too Many Tickets!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "The most effective technique..."
MY 5-POINT EMERGENCY CHURN STRATEGY
There appear to be dark clouds looming on the economic horizon. Here are my five key things you need to be doing right now to stabilize your ship.
① STOP BUYING CHURN
▪︎ The primary source of churn for most
companies is new customers that are destined to fail.
▪︎ Taking chances on bad-fit customers is a luxury companies cannot afford in hard times.
▪︎ Therefore, the first step is to choke off churn at the source.
② PRIORITIZE SAVE-ABLE ACCOUNTS
▪︎ It’s essential in a crisis to spend limited resources where they’ll have the biggest impact.
▪︎ In good times, you can focus on the customers who are most likely to fail.
▪︎ But difficult times require a shift in mindset to prioritize the accounts you can most likely make successful.
③ MEASURE + MATERIALIZE CUSTOMER RESULTS
▪︎ When the going gets tough, your customers will ruthlessly cut any costs that aren’t connected to their survival.
▪︎ You can no longer rely on your product's “benefits”, “value”, or even its “ROI".
▪︎ Retention depends on measuring and materializing the customer results that are vital to their business.
④ HELP CUSTOMERS DOWNSIZE TO STAY
▪︎ During challenging economic times, it's necessary to shift priorities from retaining DOLLARS to keeping CUSTOMERS.
▪︎ Budget pressure will lead customers to look for ways to “right-size” their spending.
▪︎ Helping customers down-size their accounts is a key crisis retention strategy.
⑤ INVEST IN UP-SKILLING YOUR TEAM
▪︎ You can never have as many people as you need, but in bad times you can often lose some of your best people.
▪︎ That’s why it’s critical to figure out how to improve your team members’ confidence and abilities to punch above their weight.
▪︎ The key is to focus on simplifying your processes and coaching key customer skills.
UPCOMING LIVE EVENT!
On October 15th I'm going to be moderating a live debate hosted by Mayple between two of the biggest minds in customer success: Jay Nathan and Nick Mehta!
Register now: https://www.mayple.com/live-debate
THERE CAN NEVER BE TOO MANY TICKETS!
WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY? 📊 ⤵
"A few support tickets are a sign of customer engagement, but too many tickets are a red flag for customer churn."
Not only is this wrong, it turns out it's just the opposite →
👉 THE MORE SUPPORT TICKETS CUSTOMERS SUBMIT, THE LONGER THEY STAY! 👈
Our previously published research on customer retention (download the full report here) reveals a consistent relationship between customer tickets and average customer lifespan.
But the fascinating finding here is that there is no threshold number of tickets beyond which the relationship reverses!
In other words, customers can't submit too many tickets.
📊 Our research reveals that the customers who submit the most tickets stay many times longer than those who submit none or only a few tickets!
WHY? Like so many other findings, this may seem counterintuitive. Doesn't a large number of tickets indicate that a customer is failing?
Remember that...
► Support tickets are a signal that customers are engaging with the solution and trying to make it work.
✅ PRINCIPLE: Customers who are engaging and trying are more likely to run into issues AND ALSO more likely to achieve results!
💭 Now, simply follow that principle through to its logical conclusion...
⦿ Customers who are trying are more likely to run into issues.
→ When their issues are solved, they get results.
→ When they get results, they want more.
→ So they try to do even more things.
→ This leads them to run into even more issues.
→ (and so on...)
What about high-severity issues? Our research didn't address this factor directly, though it's obvious these can lead to customer frustration and even the potential for churn.
But in my experience, if an issue severely impacts a customer's business, it means that the solution is extremely important to that customer. These are the customers most likely to stay.
I have found that when we do our best to address high-severity issues, customers tend to appreciate the effort, and most will not churn.
Quote of the Week...
High customer retention is the outcome of aligning everything in the business to product, measure, and materialize customer results. - Greg Daines
