Losing customers is a common phenomenon for every business no matter what size or industry you belong to. There is no single business ever who hasn’t lost potential customers in their journey. But when this phenomenon continues to stay prevalent for a longer period of time, then it becomes difficult to avoid it. In this blog, we will discuss why are customers unhappy and dissatisfied and why is your company facing customer churn? But first, let’s understand what exactly do we mean by customer churning.
Defining customer churn
The number of customers deliberately leaving your products and services is customer churn. This happens within a particular period of time. The possible factors/reasons because of which a customer/set of customers choose not to continue with your services are as follows:
- Bad customer experience,
- Poor quality of services/products,
- Inadequate customer support,
- Overpriced product/service prices,
- Low customer satisfaction,
- Irritated customer because of continuous phone calls, e-mails, etc.
The higher the customer churn rate depicts how much dissatisfied are your customers with your products, service or your brand.
But then, there are a lot of customers so why do businesses/brands need to care about the ones who are leaving them? Let’s look at what statistics have to say about it.
Real-time statistics:
- According to a study by PWC, 32% of the total people who are asked about the result of bad customer service said they wouldn’t continue. They said that they will stop subscribing to one brand if there brand experience was not to the point.
- According to Zendesk, 66% of the total customer surveyed have proactively abandoned relationships with a brand. Reason being dissatisfied customer services.
- Also continuing the trend of poor customer service, let’s look what Accenture surveyed. 48% of the customers bought products from a competitive brand solely because of bad customer experience.
- Another study shows that one in 26 customers group will bother to make a complaint when he is unhappy. Rest will move on to competitors without even uttering a word.
- The most important statistics that every business enterprise has to consider without fail is by Forrester. According to their survey, Businesses lose a whopping $1.6 trillion per year simply because of customer churning. There is more to it. It costs 5 times more to attract new customers and 16 times more to bring a new customer to the same level as an existing one.
Also Read:- Why customer retention is so important for business growth
Now one cannot avoid these mind-boggling facts and figures and need to work on reducing customer churn. Let’s analyse ways to prevent your customers from leaving you and keeping them loyal for long.
Ways to analyse factors causing customer churn and tackle it
Understanding what is causing the problem:
One has to make sure that the existing set of customers aren’t facing any kind of problems with their transactions. One has to check on why are your customers leaving you.
The simplest way is to find out while interacting with your customers. You as a business entrepreneur should make sure that your agents keep a watch on each customer’s journey.
Moreover, they should timely connect with them to understand their dissatisfaction. Customers should feel that the brand cares for them. Take their feedback and understand their issues. Offer them support and extend your help to gain their confidence and loyalty. This is the best and easiest way to make sure that your customers stay faithful to your brand.
Offering benefits:
As simple as customer handling sounds, it ain’t that easy for everyone. The competition and market are huge. You have to be on the top of your game each time to keep your customers within your bandwidth.
For this, you need to offer something apart from the products/ services they invest in. An offering can be of a promotional discount, any lucrative offers, some scheme for extra benefit etc. These are tiny steps but can lead to a greater relationship. This would show how considerate you are as a brand towards your customers. These incentive techniques will build brand loyalty too.
Hear out your customers always:
Customer complaints are equivalent to an iceberg tip. They allow you to look at the bigger picture of the customer problems which is hidden from the main view. Avoiding your customers and not hearing their complaints can hugely result in customer churn. Your customers will be left dissatisfied, irritated, frustrated and whatnot.
This will force them to leave your brand because of bad customer experiences resulting in a major loss. If you do not pay attention to your customer queries, solve them timely and offer solutions then customers aren’t going to stay with you for long.
Take care of them and they will stay with you. Customer loyalty will bring you greater benefits like increased revenue, higher profits, happy customers, good brand image and many more. Remember if a customer is happy with your services, he will definitely return back to you. Or in another case, he will definitely choose some other brand and also not recommend you further.
Also Read:- Modern technology simplifying customer problems
Conclusion:
No matter how hard you try to keep your customer base intact, some of them will still leave your brand. Customer churn is normal but not a great extent. If you keep working on your brand, your products and services, your after-sales experience and all other important factors, you will emerge as stronger and better. You will attract more new eyes and also keep your present customer base happy.
