A Smarter Way for SaaS Companies to Reduce Customer Churn
For most SaaS companies, the biggest source of revenue comes from renewals and upsells after the initial sale. Since acquiring new customers is more expensive than keeping your current ones, reducing customer churn is crucial to growth and success.
In this article we will discuss some churn indicators, and explain how running your own customer community can help you reduce your customer churn rate.
Preventing customer churn starts in the onboarding phase
Onboarding is the most critical phase for preventing customer churn. This is when customers learn how to use your product and get the most value out of it. During their training period, you need to make sure they have quick and easy access to relevant documentation and support. Failing to onboard customers properly increases their risk of churn significantly.
An online customer community can be a great help here, by being the central hub for all communication and support, using a mix of company-created knowledge and experiences from other customers.
Increase customer happiness while decreasing time spent per customer
As your company scales up, the workload of your customer success organization also increases. To serve more customers in less time, it’s important to standardize documentation and procedures so you can minimize custom work. The real challenge is doing this without compromising the customer experience. After all, customer happiness partially relies on receiving great support when asked for.
Customer communities enable peer-to-peer support and one-to-many answers, which offloads a great deal from your customer success team. Not to mention more quality answers means more satisfied customers. All in all, a customer community allows you to engage with your customers at scale, discuss topics with groups and have them help and support each other.
Product adoption is key
When predicting churn, an important indicator to look at is business value. Do customers get the value they expected from your product? Another indicator is customer happiness, which relies heavily on how happy they are using your product: Does your product function the way it should, without bugs and missing features?
Apart from measuring customer satisfaction, an online community can help you gather valuable customer feedback, engage in relevant conversations about the product and communicate your roadmap.
When customers don’t engage with your company
Not actively interacting with your company is a sign of low engagement, an indicator you can use to predict customer churn. You can stay relevant in customers’ minds through email campaigns, events or an online community. Among the three, customer communities are specially equipped to keep customers engaged. An online community is an indicator for low engagement as well as a stepping stone to increase engagement.
Interested?
If you would like to learn more about what an online community can do for your company, email us at hello@insided.com. Or see how we, as a B2B SaaS vendor, use our own community to connect with customers and prevent churn.
