Customer Churn Software: Can You Improve Customer Relationships During a Crisis?
If customer success leaders can agree on anything it’s that 2020 has been anything but normal. Luckily, many organizations have faced the ongoing crisis by quickly pivoting to new value-based initiatives or doubling down on customer-focused solutions. No matter how quickly your team adapted to this ‘new normal’, however, you’re more than likely dealing with unforeseen customer churn.
Regardless of how successful your accounts were trending in the early months of 2020, an out-of-nowhere economic crisis is the perfect catalyst for organizations to ‘trim’ their vendor list down to the essentials. Now that we’ve spent months in this ongoing crisis and, unfortunately, know how this kind of situation can impact a customer success team (and a larger SaaS organization in general) down the road, customer success teams can take these new insights to build a strategic plan for crisis management. And at the top of this list, of course, is customer churn.
Whether or not your team currently invests in a customer churn platform, addressing and mitigating churn risk is going to be a top focus for customer success teams in the latter half of 2020 and beyond. Customer churn software – oftentimes bundled with a customer success management platform – can help control unforeseen customer churn while enabling customer success managers to proactively improve customer relationships and address issues.
Here are three ways customer churn software can help improve customer relationships during a crisis:
1. Customer success teams can be flexible and quickly adapt to changing customer priorities.
One of the most important things the 2020 crisis has taught customer success organizations is the power of being flexible. Being able to quickly pivot to help customers reach their goals – even if these are new goals established very recently – is key in stopping potential customer churn in its tracks. A dedicated customer churn platform gives CSMs the flexibility and insight they need to successfully change customer journey maps mid-program.
2. CSMs have advanced notice of potential issues or the possibility of churn.
Often, the customers that churn ‘unexpectedly’ during a crisis are ones who had previous issues or concerns with a vendor but the CSM was unaware. When a crisis hits, customer success teams must be able to quickly look at their book of business and identify any red flags that could signal a potential churn. Customer churn software takes into account things like NPS score, engagement levels, customer sentiment, and growth potential to determine what accounts are at risk of churn.
3. It’s easier to deliver amazing and valuable customer experiences which can reduce the risk of churn.
If you’re going through a crisis or if a customer is at risk of churn, now is the time to double down on value and focus on delivering amazing service. Going above and beyond for customers, whether it’s working on a project out of scope or calling for all hands on deck to expedite an open item, can give customers the little boost they needed to put them back on track to success.
Putting knowledge into action
If your team has been experiencing higher-than-normal levels of customer churn during this current crisis and are looking for an actionable proactive solution, ClientSuccess can help. Our industry-leading customer success management platform includes software designed to help mitigate and control customer churn by delivering amazing customer experiences at every turn.
You can talk to one of our customer success specialists today to see if the ClientSuccess platform fits your needs.
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