For businesses operating in the digital environment, customer satisfaction demands additional effort.
Through cutting-edge technologies and potential business infrastructure, brand reputation can be ensured in the digital market. There exist several challenges for online businesses to survive and thrive where the competition is very high.
The businesses that vigilantly adopt innovative solutions to cope with the situations tend to get the edge. This article covers one major challenge that has a direct relationship with business growth and revenue. Customer Churn.
What Is Customer Churn?
The customer churn rate refers to the number of customers that leave your company or cancel their subscriptions during a particular period.
It demonstrates the performance of the business, the positives, and the negatives that are affecting your business growth. It is the opposite of customer retention.
How Customer Churn Can Hurt Your Business
Customer churn rate is a real headache for businesses as it dictates the brand image and demonstrates your capability of retaining and entertaining customers.
Increased customer churn rate negatively impacts business revenue. For instance, in eCommerce businesses, a customer adds goods to the cart but due to the overwhelming checkout process, he abandons the cart. Similarly, due to this reason, the cart abandonment rate would increase and business would be at loss.
- Customer churn reduces the business profit and ultimately contributes to the revenue loss
- Churn demands more investments in marketing and increases the costs of acquiring them again.
- It makes complex to determine the customer lifetime value.
- It negatively affects the company’s prospects and goals.
- It leaves a negative brand image in the market.
Reasons Why Customer Churn Increases
There could be many reasons for customer churn that vary from niche to niche. Accordingly, some solutions help curb the risks and provide an optimized experience to experience that aligns as per their interests as well as expectations.
Below are some common reasons that force customers to leave the platform before the agreement;
- One reason could be that you are targeting and reaching out to the wrong audience. The customers with irrelevant interests would be more likely to abandon the services.
- Your customers are unable to find the products or services according to their expectations. It means you are lacking somewhere and your products need improvement.
- You do not provide desired support to customers. Customer support and service should be excellent enough to address the client’s query efficiently.
- The bugs in your system discourage your customers and they leave your services.
- Your product is too expensive for many startups. One more reason could be that the additional features are paid in your system which your competitors are giving for free.
- The credit card of your customer has expired due to which further payments cannot be made.
- The system asked so many unnecessary details that the user gets frustrated and ultimately leaves the platform.
- The hard-to-understand features in your website become the reason for customer retention.
- The complex payment method or unaligned payment gateways.
- The strong competitor strategies and discounts for the users drag your customers due to which churn occurs.
All these and many other reasons call for a well-designed and established business infrastructure that might require the integration of some technological solutions that help you streamline the user journey on your platform.
How Advanced SaaS Reporting and Analytics Curb Churn Rate
Living with the pace the digital world is floating by is the only solution. Adoption of high-scale technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, etc. is revamping the way traditional businesses used to operate.
Businesses that want to thrive in the lane of competitors, need to take into account technological aspects that could streamline the revenue streams. One of the reasons is that digital users are increasing rapidly and they have the knowledge of customer experience due to which their demands are sky rising. To meet customer expectations, businesses need to stay a step ahead of competitors.
AI-enabled advanced SaaS analytics and reporting tools such as top subscription management software give meaningful insights to businesses that can be employed to reduce the customer churn rate. How?
Real-time analytics incorporates a wide range of features and characteristics based on which business revenue is predicted. Forecasts help businesses to improve productivity and revenue by taking into consideration the aspects that tend to contribute to increasing revenue. For instance, these attributes include the page revisits by customers, consumer behavior, the time user stays at a particular page, the churn rate, cancellation of payments, failed payments, the recurring revenue subscriptions, etc.
All these attributes individually or collectively impact the revenue of a business. The need however is to predict all of them through real-time analytics. AI-powered analytics and reporting tools for SaaS businesses incorporate the generation of reports beforehand. These reports give graphical representations of these attributes based on which meaningful insights can be drawn to make business decisions. If the performance of recurring revenue is falling, businesses can employ advanced marketing techniques and invest in campaigns to build brand reputation. Similarly, if the performance is retained, similar techniques can be continued. In this way, analytical reports demonstrate the interests of customers through their buying behavior and businesses get to know when and where they need to make improvements. Ultimately, the churn rate can be reduced.
SaaS Metrics and Elements to Ponder
The SaaS metrics offered by the top analytics and reporting tool incorporate elements based on which brand credibility can be identified.
These elements help businesses to determine the point where their business is present and accordingly, plan outreach for prospects. The following are some common KPIs that are considered in the SaaS metrics to pave roads for business success.
Customer Conversion Rate
This is the ratio of people that came to your website as leads and got converted into regular customers. This attribute is crucial as it calculates the number of visitors businesses would require to reach the revenue goals. If the customer conversion rate is low, businesses need to determine the activities that need improvement and identify whether it is required in the sales funnel or customer support service.
Churn Rate
As discussed, it is one of the most important parts of the SaaS metric that helps SaaS businesses to identify the rate at which their customers are leaving. Businesses can actively run marketing campaigns or make improvements in the system to acquire new customers and retain the older ones.
ARPU
This is the average revenue per user. It dictates how much every single user is contributing to the monthly or yearly revenue of the business. This average could vary based on the users that have subscribed to the recurring billing model or some other payment method. However, it generally gives insights into the health of a business.
CAC
This refers to the customer acquisition cost. For instance, it determines the cost a business would need to invest to acquire the customer. This could be the budget of marketing campaigns or third-party tools that can help acquire customers at a faster pace.
MRR and ARR
These refer to the monthly recurring and annual recurring revenue. Real-time analytics tend to present a report that incorporates all the details of business revenue concerning a particular time. In this way, the health of a business can be interpreted.
LTV
This is the lifetime value of a customer. During the user journey, it helps predict how much a user would pay you. The evaluation parameters say that the LTV of a customer should be six times greater than the actual cost business spent on acquiring that customer. This helps businesses to follow a proper plan to grow.
This SaaS metric is helpful for businesses to dynamically take actions and deploy strategies to grow. This mitigates the risks of revenue loss and ultimately contributes to the decrease in the churn rate of customers.
How Negative Churn Impacts Business Growth
The higher the negative churn rate would be, the more the business would profit. This is as a result of optimized techniques used by businesses and identifying customer interest through advanced SaaS analytics and reporting tools. If customers are getting what they are looking for, they would not step back. Hence, a strong relationship with customers must be ensured. By adhering to the customer acquisition and retention attributes, the chances of customer churn reducing from less to zero are high.
To sum up, the customer churn rate is a challenge in the digital era due to huge market competition. The use of real-time analytics and SaaS reporting software can help reduce churn rate to a significant amount and help businesses build a brand value, acquire more customers, retain older customers, and get a highly competitive edge.
Author Bio:
Soha Mehmood is a technical writer at SubscriptionFlow. Her areas of expertise are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Cloud Computing. With a diverse industrial experience, she is used to encapsulating a range of technologies that are contributing to reform world dynamics.