Rethinking Churn: A Shift Towards Retention
Do you want to tackle churn? Start by understanding retention.
It’s a common scenario. Teams diving deep into churn analysis or conducting offboarding interviews, all in an effort to understand what’s driving customers away. These strategies are crucial, but there’s another, often overlooked, side to this coin.
What if we shift our focus to understanding what drives retention among our best customers?
This approach isn’t just about fighting churn; it’s about fostering loyalty and satisfaction.
Throughout my career, I’ve kept a strong belief; it’s not about fighting churn; it’s about improving retention.
These might seem like two sides of the same coin, but to me, the strategies involved are distinct. This mindset led me to transition from analysing why customers leave to exploring why our best ones stay.
I began asking questions such as:
- What value do our top customers find in our products/services?
- Why do they remain loyal to us?
- What problems are we solving for them?
- How does their journey with our product or service unfold?
- Which behaviours are most indicative of long-term retention?
And many others came as you progressed on this path.
In seeking answers to these questions, I uncover insights that have led me to:
- Identifying successful customers and understanding why they remain with us.
- Helped marketing and sales refine ICP and acquisition strategies.
- Designing better customer journeys that encourage the same positive behaviours and milestone achievements that long-term users/customers have.
- Having the customer journey refined, improving internal CS processes and tools to support the journey;
- Identifying key actions that are associated with long-term retention.
- Finding ways to measure those key actions and include them in health score calculations that predict retention rather than churn.
It’s not an easy task and requires a lot of alignment. For example, I’ve failed to bring the product into this mindset and get them to agree on the customer journey and core actions identified.
My perspective on this was further shaped by Reforge’s Retention+Engagement program, which I highly recommend as an invaluable resource for anyone in GTM teams and product roles.
So, the next time you’re grappling with churn, try refocusing on improving retention. You might just find that this subtle shift in perspective leads to significant changes in your tactics and outcomes.
“Same same, but different, but still the same.”
