Ah, customer churn: a CSM’s very own kryptonite.
The process of measuring this attrition is called churn rate, and it’s a figure businesses want to fall somewhere between minuscule and non-existent. Customer churn is often considered to be the evil twin of customer retention, the process of actively keeping your customers. In fact, churn and retention aren’t opposites at all.
According to Rebecca Fenlon, Head of Customer Success at Cognassist:
“The opposite of losing customers isn’t retaining customers, it’s gaining customers, which is ultimately the realms of sales. Retention is a more proactive measure; you are constantly working towards it. Whereas churn is reactive and focused just on the point of renewal.”
Churn is something that affects all departments in business, not an issue to be left at the feet of a customer success team. After all, no business in their right mind would willingly want to lose its customers.
This begs the question: how can you avoid it? There’s an extraordinary amount of value attached to calculating, understanding, and preventing customer churn, which can be achieved with three things: metrics, strategy, and… software.
Along with customer onboarding and collecting feedback, customer churn is something so essential to the CS function. And having a software solution to add help keen churn in hand? Well, that’s hardly a bad investment.
When laying out the framework for our Tools of Choice 2022 Report, we asked our survey participants what their tool of choice is for measuring customer churn. A staggering 97% of people use a churn-specific tool, with a more respectable number (47.7%) of respondents using this churn tool as one of their day-to-day favorites.
What are the best tools for measuring customer churn?
Salesforce
Salesforce’s Einstein Discovery is a feature that uses a combination of analytics and AI to identify the areas susceptible to churn and share the necessary steps to prevent it. Using this platform gives the CSM operating it the capacity to eventually predict churn and stop it from repeating through customer segmentation.
Package prices are the same across both their Sales and Service Cloud and all costs below are based on annual billing
Gainsight
Rather than sit on at-risk customers, Gainsight offers a proactive solution to preventing high customer churn rates: building a solid retention strategy. The features allow CSMs to manage and forecast renewals with all customer data conveniently located in the renewal center. In addition to this, Gainsight offers cockpit access, providing an automated CTA to customers at risk, as well as ensuring all team members have visibility of at-risk customers in the timeline view.
For its CS platform, Gainsight doesn’t offer a pricing plan; you’ll have to get a quote for your business through its website.
Totango
Totango gives a practical resolution to reducing churn with its Spark product. Spark allows its users to gain insights into the entire customer journey and reduce churn, drive revenue and conversions. It’s the software that CS leaders use to achieve their own goals, as well as their customers.
Custify
Custify’s customer success software offers its users, CSMs, the ability to reduce churn, ensure product adoption, understand their customer lifecycle, and grow revenue. Custify provides an essential tool for combatting churn by proactively helping customers who have teething issues during their onboarding process.
It also allows its users to oversee product adoption and usage, identify renewal and upsell opportunities and automate customer success workflows and tasks.
Custify doesn’t offer a free plan for its users and operates a custom-designed plan for each customer so it’s best to contact them for a quote.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s customer service software helps you conduct cohesive onboarding and the opportunity to deepen your relationships with customers. It includes conversational tools, help desk automation, knowledge base functionality, customer feedback surveys, reporting, and more – all powered by a CRM to give your business one unified view of each customer interaction and proactively campaign against churn.
Vitally
Vitally’s customer health tool is one you want to have in your remit. It claims to minimize the risk of churn while maximizing the growth of your business (something we could all have a dose of). It provides automated alerts the moment a customer is a risk and tracks a multitude of metrics (even the obscure ones) to gain clear visibility into the customer’s health.
Looker
Looker harbors a key feature for its users – the Looker block for retention analysis. This provides a comprehensive analysis of retention levels for each cohort of users. Looker allows users to produce a column visualization to show the total number of users over a specific time period, and then to show churn as a percent with another visualization.
Available only via a custom quote.
Like what you've seen? Well, there's a whole lot more where that came from. Our Tools of Choice 2022 Report covers everything from customer onboarding software and segmentation, all the way to customer feedback and project management tools. Treat yourself to the full, unadulterated report today with a simple download. 👇
