As Customer Success Manager‘s we thrive on happy and successful customers. We do our utmost to speak regularly with our customers and pick up on any dissatisfaction they have with our product or service. However, as much as we would like to, it might not be possible to regularly speak to every customer. That is why it’s incredibly important that you have systems in place to help reduce churn with key customer retention analytics.
Customer Health Analytics to detect churn risk
From personal experience as a Customer Success Manager, there are often many warning signs that a customer is on a trajectory to churn. By understanding these retention metrics, and understanding what healthy metrics look like against an unhealthy metric, it is possible to put systems in place to alert you to when these unhealthy metrics occur. Often these are wrapped into a Health Score calculation.
A customer health score can be your early warning system, triggering CSM tasks when a customer’s health deteriorates. Tools such as Customer Success Box provide simple interfaces to set up your customer health score, specific to your product and determine what score changes trigger what actions.
Retention Analytics that identify churn risk
It is often a combination of metrics that can warn that a customer might be on a path to cancellation. It is important to look at these health metrics both independently and collectively to get a true picture of a client’s health.
- NPS Score – A drop in Net Promoter Score.
- CSat – A drop in Customer Satisfaction Score.
- CES – A drop in Customer Effort Score.
- Payment issues – An unusual delay in paying invoices.
- Unresponsive – A change in their usual responsiveness to calls and emails.
- Support Cases – An unusual rise in support cases.
- Customer Senitiment – Has there overall sentitment changes towards your produce of service.
- Significant Account Event – Has there been a recent change in the account, such as a price rise.
- Product Usage – Has there been a reduction in the product usage or number of logins.
- Health Score – Combining these and other metrics, has there been an overall score drop.
Reduce Churn with key Customer Retention Analytics and Actions
Changes, especially significant changes in these metrics should trigger an action appropriate to the change. If it is a minor change you might want it to trigger an email that reaches out to the customer. However, for a significant change, you probably want to get onto the phone to book a call with that customer. Customer Success platforms are worth their weight in gold for monitoring for these types of changes and ensuring you are pro-actively aware to take action.