Top 5 Reasons Churned Users Leave And Smart Ways To Stop That
Introduction
90% of buyers abandon a business after they experience bad customer service.
Another study reveals 82% of customers have left a company for the same reason.
Paid users won’t leave simply because they experience some problem with your product. Instead, they’ll contact your support. That’s the logical next step after facing a problem as a paid user.
And after contacting your support, they expect a working solution. But it only takes a single bad customer service experience at that point to make them consider churning.
Being aware of the types of bad service that make users leave will put you several steps ahead in helping you avoid more churn.
So here are the top five customer service experiences users have with your product or business that makes them churn:
1. Poor communication during change
When (not if) change happens in your business (say, a price change — for example), the way you communicate it will help customers decide whether or not it’s a favourable change for them.
Ideally, the changes you make in your business should always tilt towards benefiting your customers. And regardless of what the “change” is — even if it’s an increase in your pricing — communicate it in such a way that users feel they’re benefiting more with your higher pricing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you lie and manipulate customers; it only means you clearly communicate how your change benefits them (assuming it actually does, and if the change does not benefit the customer, do your homework to make the message really resonate with the customer).
For example, Appcues increased revenue by 263% through two well-crafted emails they used to communicate a price increase:
Notice how they tied in the promise of value to the price increase. That’s what buyers want to see and hear. Honestly communicate the benefits of any changes you’re making at your business and you’ll give consumers a good reason to keep doing business with you.
2. Cluelessness and helplessness
Only a few things are more annoying than a clueless customer support agent.
81% of surveyed consumers who had sought customer service through social media reported frustration because the representative didn’t know their history with the company.
And depending on how serious a complaint is, customers may be good and ready to churn if a customer support agent proves they are clueless. Incompetence, imagined or real, gives them a good reason to leave.
Hire the Right Kind of Support Staff
More often than not, the reason most businesses have clueless customer agents is that they invest so little in the training of their support staff. Even worse, they hire the wrong people for the job.
It’s garbage in, garbage out. Poorly-trained customer agents can get customers angry, and, in turn, your business will suffer churn. But focus on hiring qualified people: hard workers who love interacting with customers and enjoy keeping an eye out for how their business can provide value.
Well-trained support reps — with tools to understand customers and solve problems for them — will make your customers happy and have a good reason to stay with your brand.
Additionally, you can orchestrate the right mix of touch moments with your customer base. Give more attention to high-ticket clients and automate engagement with low-ticket clients — but know when to jump in when automation isn’t doing a good job. And make sure you have the right mix and match of automated emails, valuable calls and personal visits when engaging with your paying customers.
Sending Emails at the Right Moment
On top of that, always make sure customers are happy long before their next subscription renewals. Send emails at the right moment, preferably based on the customer’s online behaviour, and engage with relevant and valuable insights. Tools like Opentracker will help you do this!
Don’t forget that for a subscription-based business, recurring revenue from your current customers far outweighs the sales from your new customers. So your Customer Success is responsible for more revenue than your sales department!
If you are constantly responding to support tickets, you may find yourself on the defensive. Don’t let that happen; it’s an ingredient that invites failure.
Instead orchestrate meetings as part of a broader context where success is defined as an objective. If you share common objectives with the customer at initial contact moments, then you will have a basis for regular engagement. You then have a reason for having a meeting that focuses on success.
3. Ignoring customer complaints for a week
Ideally, you should respond to customers rapidly. 50% of consumers give you a grace of one week to attend to their complaints before they churn.
So buyers can be very forgiving — depending on how pressing their complaints or needs are — and many of them understand how busy your support team can get. But they loathe being ignored for too long.
A working solution here is to get more hands on deck. If you’re short on budget, have people in other departments help your customer success team.
For example, if you have engineers, marketers or even writers who have some free time during working hours, have them handle some support tickets — as long as they’re knowledgeable enough to do so.
Not only will this help curb having customers wait for as long as a week before receiving proper attention, occasionally working with customer support creates new insights for engineers, marketers and writers, and enhances their performance at their respective roles. In fact, occasionally shifting multidisciplinary roles is a great way to stimulate innovation within the support team.
4. Persistently slow customer service
Customers can, again, forgive when you have slow customer service once in a while. But when resolutions look like they will take an age, customers become tired and may start considering using a competitor with better customer support.
90% of customers expect an “immediate” response when they contact you for an issue related to customer service.
And buyers are impatient for good reason. Like you, they have a life with responsibilities and commitments.
Keeping them waiting for more than a week to get a reply on a complaint they took the effort to contact you about is a bad idea.
Get more hands on your customer support
Getting more hands for your customer support team is, again, a working solution here. You might be responding slowly to customers because there are not enough skilled customer support agents attending to them or the process for engaging customers has not been thought out properly.
In fact, if you start qualifying support requests and identifying customer requests that slow things down, you will likely develop a process that solves the request through self-servicing. You can engineer things like updating customer details or explaining a goods return policy so that the customer has the tools to solve their own problem.
Get a live chat system
Also, if you haven’t already, get a live chat system. Chatbots have become popular, and many customers now expect brands to have a live chat system ready on their websites.
Get into Social Media
Social media is another working channel to provide customer support for customers. Let them know they can reach your support team through tweets, Facebook messenger or even Instagram DMs.
To improve your social media customer service results, integrate these channels with a single communications tool so that you offer the customer’s preferred channel of communication. Meanwhile, your success team can still maintain a constant workflow.
This will make it much easier for them to get answers to their customer service questions. And that creates a good opportunity for you to lower churn, improve retention and focus on upselling value! It’s a no-brainer; the better you’re able to attend to and solve customer complaints, the more likely they are going to keep using your product.
5. Unexplained reasons
It’s a given: Regardless of how many support channels you provide, you’ll still have customers leaving without registering a single complaint.
Esteban Kolsky, CEO of ThinkJar and former Gartner analyst, ran a customer experience survey and found that:
“Only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest churn. A lesson here is that companies should not view the absence of feedback as a sign of satisfaction. The true enemy is indifference.”
That is, 96% of customers leave without complaining. They leave without giving any feedback. But here’s a solution: A good option is to orchestrate the process.
Show customers how the leaving process is easier if they provide feedback. Do churned customers need to cancel a subscription, filling out login details and remember passwords long forgotten? For example, at Opentracker, we compensate users who explain why they are leaving by donating to a charity of their choosing. And any feedback is welcome — because we use it to keep improving our product and lowering churn!
Another working solution:
Even when customers don’t say anything to you, many of them will still vent their disappointment with your product somewhere, somehow — in a Facebook group, on their blog, in a forum or anywhere else online.
Set up alerts for mentions of your brand/product online. There are several tools you can use for this. Keyhole, Mention, Sprout Social and Google Alerts come in handy here. You can set up alerts in these tools to inform you when someone mentions your brand or product on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
This way, you’re able to catch feedback from users who leave without any complaints. Then you can contact them and see how you can solve their issues and make them your customer again.
Conclusion
70% of unhappy customers whose problems are resolved are willing to shop with a business again. That means great customer service produces better customer retention for your business.
But when users leave due to a bad customer service experience, they often cause more damage than just churn; chances are high they’ll take their friends, connections and family along with them. Businesses that focus on their customers’ success not only create happy customers but also increase the experienced value and grow their profits.
And this is why more and more online businesses are increasing their spend on customer service. You should, too.
Want to dig deeper into why your customers churn? We’ll help you run a comprehensive churn analysis, identify why your users are leaving, and proffer working solutions.
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