How You Can Lower Customer Churn At Your SaaS Company.
Sep 18, 2024
Olivier van den Hoogen
Co-founder Turf
Introduction
Lowering customer churn rates probably is on every SaaS companies list of business goals and has been since forever. Your SaaS company is able to acquire new customers on a consistent basis but is that number higher than the customers that you are losing? How well are you able to retain customers and for how long? For a lot of SaaS companies, getting existing customers to stay a customer longer might even be easier than acquiring new customers. In either scenario your churn rates are probably too high and you are trying your hardest to lower them. Well, you have come to the right place! Without further a do, here are 3 ways to lower customer churn at your SaaS company.
1. Build a customer community environment.
Building a customer community around your brand and SaaS application basically means allowing your customers and users to communicate with one another in online community forums. This allows your user base to ask each other support related questions, help each other out, discuss how to use your SaaS application most effectively, and cover industry related topics. With a customer community environment you are building a community around your brand where you customers will directly attach the value that they are getting from your community, to your brand. Here's how a customer community will lower your churn rates:
You are giving customers an easier and more efficient way of finding an answer to their question by searching an ever growing knowledge base of posts and answers written in the users point of view. This improves customer satisfaction and makes it easier for them to be successful with your product and experience the value of your product.
You are exposing your customers to other customers that are a similar persona and are building a community feeling and sense of belonging around your brand. Enable them to communicate and bond with one another about best practices in their niche or industry, new developments in their niche, the most effective ways to use your product for their specific use case, and more. All the value that they get from these interactions will be directly attached to your brand. This will build loyalty towards your brand, improve customer engagement, and lower customer churn rates.
A customer community environment will allow you to create more touch points with your user base and therefore increase involvement with your brand and customer engagement. For example, in a customer community environment you are able to communicate announcements, new product releases, display your roadmap, involve them in voting on roadmap items, allow them to submit feature request and report bugs, communicate feedback about your product, host online events, share industry related content, and much more. The more touch points you can create, the more engaged your customers will be and the more it will lower your customer churn rates.
Read more about how you can create a customer community environment for your SaaS company here or directly schedule a demo to see what a community environment could look like for your company here.
2. Display your roadmap and let customers influence it.
Display your roadmap of upcoming features and changes to your product. This allows your customers to see what they can expect and understand the direction that your product is heading in. Allow your customers to vote on roadmap items and create feature requests themselves. Here's how a roadmap and customer feedback board will lower your churn rates:
By having influence in the direction that the product is going, customers feel like they are a part of your brands journey and have contributed to its development. This commits your customers to your brand and builds loyalty.
If your product team is listening to your customers and is implementing much wanted features that are being displayed on the roadmap, customers will have insight into when which desired features are being released. They will hang around for those upcoming features and be more committed to staying with your brand and product.
Read more about how you can create a roadmap display or customer feedback board for your SaaS company here.
3. Showcase your customer success and support modules inside your SaaS application.
Display customer success and support modules like your knowledge base and academy, inside your SaaS application. Depending on your software vendor for these modules, you can easily do this through an in-app widget that allows your customers to directly access each customer success or support module from within your SaaS application. Here's how bringing your customer success and support modules inside your SaaS application, will lower your churn rates:
You are giving customers an easier and more efficient way of accessing and using your customer success and support modules by showcasing them in the exact moment they need it - when they are inside your product and are using it in real-time. It significantly increases usage of each module that is accessible from inside your application. An increase in usage of customer success and support modules means more educated users that are successful with your product and experience the value of your product.
