Reducing SaaS Churn
Focus on Reducing SaaS churn is an essential element of your business toolkit when you have a SaaS-based on-demand business. As a growing SAAS company, you must be looking to get more customers. However, are you focused on keeping your existing customers happy and in business with you? Even if you are getting new customers, real growth cannot be achieved if your current customers are leaving you. Saas Churn is the rate at which your current customers are becoming your ex-customers. Logically, each business should be looking to reduce this rate as higher rate reflects the poor health of the company. This article discusses some of the important strategies which most companies can adopt that will be reducing SAAS Churn.
Tips for Reducing SaaS Churn
1: Make Churn numbers visible
The first step towards achieving something in any organization is to make it visible. Don’t keep it to any single department or few people. Inform all the relevant people and departments about the importance and benefits of reducing SAAS Churn and your strategy to reduce it. Also, gather input from them and make the final plan accordingly.
2: Do you know your competitive advantage?
In the long run, it is necessary for each business and company to have some competitive advantage to survive and grow. Brainstorm and get to know about your competitive advantage. Brand names, cost leadership or better quality can be competitive advantages. Make sure you know them as you would be attracting customers due to this prospect of your company. Next step is to analyze your internal controls and practices to find any loopholes which can make you deviate from this competitive advantage. Make sure to put enough controls in place. For example, if an organization is known to provide services for a lesser cost, then introducing a new service with more than average market price is more likely to discourage customers.
3: Make sure to have the right audience:
Even large multinational companies cannot target the whole population in any area. It is crucial to target the right target market with your sales and marketing messages. Targeting the wrong fit of audience results in churn as people fail to understand and appreciate your products and its core values. One issue to address is that of providing free-trails. Do some research and understand if free trials are likely to improve your business. Providing free trials to customers often help them to appreciate your service, and they get encouraged to buy it. On the other hand, it is also possible for customers to readily go for a trial version, but they are never ready to buy your service or product.
4: Find the right business partners:
It can also be helpful to work with other businesses. The rationale here is to attract and retain customers by offering complimentary services. Provide additional services or add-ons and integrate them into your SAAS product.
5: Identify red flags:
Relationships don’t end in a single day most of the times. Instead, there is a relevant history of wrongdoings and unattended problems which gradually lead to breakups. The relationship between customer and SAAS business is no different as well. Customers don’t just decide to break this business relationship out of the blue. Instead, there is usually a big list of things going wrong one by one, and finally, customers decide to find a new provider. It is, therefore, crucial to have a system which identifies any red flags (measuring customer satisfaction is discussed in the next heading).
6: Measure customer satisfaction:
Instead of waiting for things to go wrong and then correcting them, it is better to make necessary efforts before things go wrong. It is, therefore, worthwhile to have some practices in place to measure your customer satisfaction. Surveys, questionnaire or directly contacting a randomly chosen sample are often used. It acts as a feed-forward system and allows you to understand the aspects of your business with which customers seem unhappy. If customers are unhappy with some aspects, you can make sure to make them right to be reducing SaaS churn.
7: Make your product stand out:
Use white papers, case studies, and customer testimonials to provide the social proof of your products’ effectiveness. It is sometimes also beneficial to provide third-party evidence to provide an unbiased review of your product. Your current customers are likely to feel proud in this situation and are likely to remain your customers.
8: Publish your Churn strategies
Make sure to communicate to all of your employees the methods you intend to deploy to be reducing SaaS churn. The future of your company may depend on it.
