Signs a Customer Is About to Leave — and How to Prevent It

Signs a Customer Is About to Leave — and How to Prevent It

Related: Listen to Your Customer: Turn to Data to Discover Their Truth Pay attention to early symptoms. While churn typically manifests itself when a customer’s software contract is up for renewal, the seeds are sown much earlier, and the symptoms start manifesting themselves as early as the first 90 days of a customer relationship. Closely monitor product usage and customer education data to track if users are successfully onboarding with your product. Also, pay close attention to the tasks you have outlined for users to derive value from your product in the first 90 days. Are you seeing a drop-off in product usage once users hit a certain set of features? While this depends on the nature of the product, it’s typically a bad sign if you’re seeing only a select group of users interacting with the product, especially when the product was designed for broad consumption. A good way to address this is by having a set of stakeholders across the product, customer success and marketing teams own and optimize the onboarding process. Best practice is to adopt continuous, self-service user onboarding strategies, such as on-demand training, whenever a new user appears in the system. During the sales process and customer conversations, be sure to understand who should be using the product in a given organization and track this throughout the customer lifecycle in your CRM. Identify drivers of churn: Churn happens.

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Signs a Customer Is About to Leave -- and How to Prevent It

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It’s disheartening to see a hard-won customer cancel their contract. Beyond being disheartening, churn can be an existential threat, especially for software as a service (SaaS) companies. The difference between positive and negative churn can mark the difference between successfully growing your business or struggling to stay afloat.

With churn, like most things in life, an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. Paying attention to the right leading indicators and acting decisively can make all the difference.

Related: Listen to Your Customer: Turn to Data to Discover Their Truth

Pay attention to early symptoms.

While churn typically manifests itself when a customer’s software contract is up for renewal, the seeds are sown much earlier, and the symptoms start manifesting themselves as early as the first 90 days of a customer relationship. Here are three things to look for:

Product onboarding: The first 90 days are absolutely critical when it comes to churn prevention. Closely monitor product usage and customer education data to track if users are successfully onboarding with your product. Pay particularly close attention to the delta between the number of software licenses sold and the number of users taking training and logging on to the product. Any gulf is a sign of trouble. Also, pay close attention to the tasks you have outlined for users to derive value from your product in the first 90 days. If you’re not seeing users complete these tasks, that’s a red flag.

Per-user product engagement: Beyond the first 90 days, keep a close eye on product usage at the per-user level. Are you seeing users log on to your product consistently? Are they discovering new and advanced features as they spend more time and grow more comfortable with the software? What is the nature of support tickets that they’re creating? Are these related to introductory or advanced features? Are you seeing a drop-off in product usage once users hit a certain set of features?

The breadth of usage in the customer organization: Also important to track, beyond the first 90 days, is the footprint of usage…

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