;)
Customer success isn’t just about keeping your customers happy. it’s also about ensuring they get the resolution to their pain points and requirements with your product or service. When customers get it, they stick around. When they don’t, they leave. Here you need a well-implemented customer success strategy that proactively addresses issues before they lead to churn.
Customer churn, or the rate at which customers stop doing business with you, is more than just a lost sale. It’s a sign that something is wrong within your business—it may be poor onboarding, lack of proper support, unmet expectations, or your competitors offering something better than you.
To help you out here, in this blog we will explore some of the best practices for customer success that directly impact churn reduction.
This blog will cover:
How to calculate the churn rate?
10 customer success best practices to reduce churn
Best customer success tools to reduce customer churn
Customer churn refers to the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service within a specific period.
It is the percentage of customers who leave during a specific period (typically monthly or annually) relative to the total number of customers at the start of that period.
It works as a key indicator of customer retention and business health, especially for companies with recurring revenue models like SaaS, telecom, and subscription-based services.
If you are facing a high churn rate chances are high that your business is facing some major issues, such as poor customer experience, low engagement, or unmet expectations. It may also indicate that competitors are offering better solutions. Understanding and addressing the causes of churn is important for maintaining long-term customer relationships and driving sustainable growth.
Customer Success (CS) is a strategic approach that ensures customers achieve their goals using your product or service.
Unlike traditional customer support, which reacts to problems, customer success takes a proactive approach—anticipating challenges, providing guidance, and building strong relationships.
With rising competition and the growing dominance of recurring revenue models, customer success helps brands drive business growth. According to Gartner, two-thirds of companies now compete primarily on customer experience.
When customers see real value in your product and understand that your brand is committed to ensuring their well-being, they are more likely to stay, advocate for your brand, and contribute to its expansion.
Churn can be measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. A monthly churn rate helps you to monitor short-term trends, an annual churn rate provides a broader view of subscriber loyalty and long-term attrition.
The churn rate is calculated by dividing the churned customers by the total number of customers at the beginning of the period, expressed as a percentage.
Churn Rate= (Total Customers at the Start of the Period/Customers Lost During the Period) ×100
For example, if your company had 1000 customers at the beginning of the month and you lost 50 customers during that period, then its customer churn rate would be 5%.
According to Gartner, 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of its existing customers. So, it’s clear that retaining and keeping your current customers happy is important for the long-term success of your business. But how can you ensure they stay? Below, we have outlined some of the best practices to help you build your effective customer retention strategies.
It may seem obvious, but we need to do this—understanding why your customers are leaving is important. The best way to do this is by asking them the reasons directly.
And it won’t happen by only sending generic emails or automated surveys. Picking up the phone and speaking directly to customers shows that you genuinely care about their experience. More importantly, it allows you to find out the exact reasons behind their decision to leave your brand. Studies show that 68% of customers leave because they feel a company doesn’t value them and don’t let yours be one of them.
So, don’t let them go. Avoid the passive approach of sending exit surveys that often go unanswered. Instead, take the initiative to call them personally and ask what went wrong. This direct feedback provides invaluable insights into the underlying problems, whether your product truly meets customer needs or is causing frustration or your customer service is not up to the mark. Based on those feedback you can work on further betterment.
The best way to reduce churn is to stop it before it happens.
Some customers are always more likely to leave than others and identifying them early gives you a chance to stop them before they make that decision to leave. So, how do you spot these at-risk customers? Start by looking at those who haven’t contacted your brand for a while. Find out if there are leads who requested a price list, a quote, or more information but never received a follow-up from your side.
Tracking these signs allows you to take proactive steps to re-engage with them, initiate conversations, strengthen relationships, and ultimately prevent churn before it’s too late.
A well-structured onboarding process is the first step to ensuring long-term customer success. When customers understand how to use your products quickly and efficiently, they are more likely to stay engaged, get the best out of your offerings, and remain loyal to your brand.
If you want to deliver truly personalized experiences, then you need to understand your customers and their specific needs.
One of the most effective ways to gather customer insights is through welcome surveys. Typically integrated into the sign-up process, these surveys allow you to capture valuable details about your customers, their requirements, preferences and goals right from the start.
A well-designed welcome survey should be brief and to the point, focusing on key questions that help you segment customers accurately. Avoid asking irrelevant questions, as they can create unnecessary friction and potentially discourage customers from completing the survey. By keeping it concise and relevant, you ensure you collect the most important data without overwhelming your customers.
Proactivity is one of the key components of customer success. Don’t wait for your customers to come to you when some issue arises or they need help. Rather it would be great if you reach out to them proactively and check if everything is fine or if they need some assistance. By offering proactive customer support before they ask for it, you show that you genuinely care about their experience and are always happy to help them.
In addition to proactive outreach, empowering customers with self-service resources is also important. A well-organized resource center can help users resolve issues on their own, reducing their dependency on your customer success team for every query. You can include product documentation, instruction manuals, video tutorials, and helpful blog posts there. These on-demand resources give customers the first hand to solve problems quickly and independently, enhancing their overall experience.
A successful customer success strategy involves many moving parts, and manually managing them can be time-consuming, and costly for you. The good news is that AI can help you automate many of these processes, making it easier to manage customer success at scale.
For instance, you can use AI-powered chatbots to provide real-time assistance to customers 24/7, ensuring they have access to support whenever they need it. Additionally, AI allows you to set up automated surveys that are triggered either at regular intervals or based on specific customer actions.
By automating these key customer success functions, you can optimize your resources, improve efficiency, and focus more on building meaningful relationships with customers.
What sets you apart from your competitors and makes your product or service the go-to choice for your customers? And perhaps most importantly, what will your customers miss out if they choose to leave?
Answering these questions is important for identifying your competitive advantages. These advantages act like a magnet, that attracts customers to your brand and keeps them engaged. By understanding what the brand does better or what makes it unique, you can better emphasize these qualities in your marketing and customer communications.
However, simply having a competitive advantage also isn’t enough. You also need to make customers aware of these USPs. Don’t assume that customers will recognize your value. So, actively highlight all the USPs in your brand messaging, content, and interactions to ensure your target audience understands how your brand is better and different from other competitors.
Even the smallest gesture, whether it’s a discount, a special promotion, or a deal can make a big difference in customer retention. These incentives show your customers that you value their business, making them more likely to stick to your brand.
But timing is the key to maximizing the impact of your incentives. For example, offering a discounted upgrade rate right before a contract expires can encourage customers to renew their subscription.
Also, if you sense that a customer is about to leave your brand because he is not satisfied with your services, you can offer a temporary discount or exclusive benefits to keep him engaged while you work on a solution.
All of your other efforts will fail to retain customers if you don’t offer good products and services to your customers. If your offering truly meets customer needs, provides value, and continuously improves for betterment, customers will have very little reason to leave.
The key to retention is ensuring that your product or service consistently delivers on its promises. Customers expect reliability, ease of use, and ongoing improvements that can enhance their experience. If they encounter frequent issues with your offerings, outdated features, or a lack of innovation, eventually they will start exploring alternatives and replace your brand.
One of the most effective ways to retain customers is to actively ask for their feedback on what they think about your offerings and use it in your business to improve your product, service, and overall experience. Customers want to feel heard and valued, and when you show them that their opinions matter, they are more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
Frequent feedback helps you identify potential pain points of your customers before they lead to churn. It allows you to spot dissatisfaction early and take proactive steps to address the concerns. Whether it’s through surveys, direct conversations, or customer feedback tools, gathering insights regularly ensures you are always updated and offering the best experiences to your customers.
But remember one thing! Simply collecting the feedback is not enough—you must act on it. Let customers know how their input is shaping improvements, whether it’s fixing a bug, introducing a new feature, or enhancing customer support.
Next, let’s explore the 5 best customer success tools that can help you reduce churn, enhance customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.
REVE Chat is one of the best AI powered omnichannel customer success tool designed to improve customer retention and engagement. By offering instant assistance across websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms, REVE Chat ensures that your business can proactively connect with customers and address their needs much before they ask for it.
With its multilingual AI chatbot, REVE Chat streamlines customer interactions by automating key processes such as support, onboarding, and engagement. This not only reduces response times but also improves issue resolution efficiency, giving your customers the best experiences to stick to your brand.
Userpilot is a powerful customer success tool that helps businesses drive user engagement, retention, and reduce churn. With features like personalized onboarding, in-app guidance, and product adoption tools, Userpilot ensures customers quickly understand and experience the full value of your product.
By proactively engaging users from day one, with Userpilot you can minimize friction in the customer journey. You can offer assistance in navigating all your product features effortlessly and achieve their goals faster. When customers recognize the value of your services early on, they are less likely to look for alternatives.
Zendesk is another customer success tool designed to enhance customer retention and reduce churn by delivering seamless and real-time support. With its omnichannel capabilities, Zendesk ensures businesses can engage with customers across websites, email, chat, social media, and phone, providing assistance whenever and wherever it’s needed.
By streamlining customer interactions and resolving issues efficiently, Zendesk helps businesses build trust, strengthen relationships, and keep customers engaged. Its intuitive support system ensures that customers receive timely, personalized experiences, increasing retention and driving long-term success.
Qualtrics is a powerful customer success tool that helps businesses reduce churn by identifying at-risk customers, understanding their concerns, and taking proactive measures to retain them. With its AI-driven analytics, real-time feedback collection, and predictive insights, Qualtrics empowers companies to address customer issues promptly before they escalate.
With Qualtrics, you can gather customer feedback and use those insights to personalize customer experiences, strengthen relationships, and win their hearts so that they never look for other options.
It is a customer success platform designed to help businesses predict, prevent, and reduce customer churn by delivering proactive and personalized experiences. It provides real-time customer health analytics, automated engagement workflows, and in-depth insights to help businesses retain their most valuable customers.
Customer success is the lifeblood of every business, and reducing churn requires a strategic approach and following the best practices mentioned above. By implementing all or some of those customer success best practices as per your business requirements, you ensure customers see the full potential of your product or service and are less likely to search for new alternate brands.
Ultimately, customer success and retention depend on delivering ongoing value at every stage—whether through proactive guidance, personalized experiences, or reinforcing long-term benefits. When customers feel supported and see tangible results, they are more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share
Are you an online business owner, and your team is juggling customer inquiries from emails, phone calls, and social media?...
Put yourself in a situation where you notice a strange transaction on your credit card. Panic sets in. Instead of...
Consider agents and assistants in real life. Assistants follow your guidelines and instructions in order to complete the work assigned...
