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What tactics do you employ to enhance customer retention and reduce churn?

🟧 Hugo H. Macedo 🟧
🟧 Hugo H. Macedo 🟧
Advisor & Investor | Product Marketing Expert | B2B | Formerly Pandadoc,Unbabel, McKinsey • January 23

Churn is a consequence, and most often, it is too late. You need to go backward and identify the problems.

Segment the problem:

  • no usage

  • low usage

  • support/technical issues

  • competition

Then, you need to choose what you will tackle first based on volume/value and hypotheses on how to fix it.

For each, you need to dive deep and understand more of the issue. Who's the persona and/or use-case? any specific customer segment (e.g. enterprise customers)

Some hypothesis to start with:

  • No usage - never passed the onboarding phase and was never adopted, the champion could purchase/subscribe but never to implement.

  • Low usage - only a tiny fraction of users or use-cases have activity not enough to deliver the value expected (and paid)

  • Support/Technical issues - how frequent and big is this? Does it relate to the same part of the product? e.g. Integration, SSO

  • Competition - is there a prevalent competitor? Is it price or features? What are the features/capabilities that are better?

Work with the relevant team to understand the problem and evaluate its size and shape. Then, work on potential solutions and use an "effort x impact " matrix to prioritize. E.g., a new feature can solve the problem but can take 6 months to roll out.

Sometimes churn can be a mismatch between Product and Go-to-market strategy, i.e. we're selling the product to the wrong segment with the wrong positioning. Examples:

  • Selling an SMB product to an Enterprise - a sales was made but then roll-out/onboarding hit some implementation "walls" due to lack of features/integrations or proper implementation/rollout management

  • Selling an SMB product to individuals - individuals use a fraction of the features until they get what they want or realize that it's too expensive, too much for them.

This can be checked by analyzing churn by customer segment, in this case.

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