The moment when customers start churning
People have started caring a lot more about customer success in the past few years. And it makes sense, too — stopping a customer from churning can be up to 25 times cheaper than acquiring a new one.
But often times, customer success focuses on the wrong parts of the customer journey- and there’s a few patterns I’ve seen often. Commonly, churn is attributed to “product issues.” When I ask customer success managers why their customers churn, I hear reasons like:
- The customer was not an ideal user of the product
- Our competitors have better features for their use case
- (in larger sales) Any variety of account-related concerns (budget was tightening for the customer, the customer just got a new CFO, etc…)
And in all of these situations, these reasons may be exactly why the customer churned! But framing the issue like this misses the real reason why the churn happened in the first place: your customer’s relationship with your product eroded to the point where they didn’t see value in continuing to pay for it.
This is the ultimate reason why customers churn- while there may be a big reason that customers can point to, turns out that setting up, and maintaining, and excellent customer-product relationship can go a long way to preventing these big reasons from creeping up. You can imagine a customer who is deeply invested into your product fighting against her new CFO on it- the product has treated her well, so naturally she’ll do the same.
It’s important to note that “product” in this case is not just the digital thing- it’s also all of the supporting experiences that your customer will have with your company and the team- you are the product!
So how do you establish- and maintain- and excellent customer-product relationship? It’s a tough question: basically every interaction that your customer has will shape influence that relationship. But at Correly we’ve found one moment in the customer journey disproportionately affect this relationship- the onboarding.
A good onboarding changes everything
When your customer is onboarded, you set the tone. The customer’s attitudes towards your product are being forged, and they set very quickly. First impressions matter:
- What is the primary emotion that your customer will associate with your product?
- What is the overall level of experience will they expect?
- How important is the product to the customer- is it a loose relationship or is it very close?
It’s imperative that you execute a great onboarding for every customer, and you obsess about the way you do it. There are many components of a great onboarding:
Here are some stats that we’ve gathered at Correly:
It’s clear to us that onboardings are very important. But, we’ve failed at executing on the past. Here are our most important on-boarding (and general CS) related learnings:
Intercom (or similar tools ) are huge
Most people see Intercom as a chat tool- after all, that’s all you really see on the front-end as a user. But Intercom has been the single most useful tool to our onboarding.
Simply put, we just didn’t have a way to keep track of all of our users before starting with Intercom. Other products double down on chat, but Intercom is a lightweight tool that supports customers across the journey and they’ve built out their value add in a very interesting way to us.
Plus, on a cross-functional team like ours where every employee performs some amount of customer success, being able to assign each user to an “owner” is invaluable.
Experiment with your onboarding cadence. Here are some “hacks” we’ve found to be pretty helpful to increase engagement:
- Sending a user a message or email after they use a core features (to us, that’s starting a meeting) increases engagement hugely (there’s an example below)
- Writing messages personally (even though Intercom) is huge for engagement. Starting your message with their first name is nice, but it’s standard nowadays. We’ve found that customers really connect to simple genuine personalization- a comment or two about their position or company can bump engagement by 20% or more. We haven’t found a great way to do this at scale, so we do it by hand.
- The product tour is an amazing feature, but only a small fraction of users engage with it- if it’s option, less than 20%. Surprisingly, even if it’s mandatory, over 30% skip over it.
Act like you’re smaller than you are: Customer Paradise
What company has the world’s best customer support experience? Neither you or me have heard of it. Chances are, it’s a 4 person startup, where every customer is onboarded and managed by someone who designed, built, and breathed the product.
Tickets are created, responded to, and resolved over a period of half an hour max- even if they’re engineering issues.
This is customer paradise. Paradise- because it’s literally unattainable for almost every company. But the hypothetical gives us something to reach towards- how can we work towards the ideal?
Write like you’re a small company
There’s always a pull to talk professionally, and give off the impression of your company being large and established. Logically, it makes sense- you want your customer to trust your brand, and larger brands are more stable, and thus, more trustworthy.
But I’ve noticed the opposite, actually. Customers feel more distant than larger brands- because generally, larger brands are less responsive and care less about customer experience than SMBs or start-ups.
We’ve started embracing our identity as a small company, and our voice has really changed a lot.
Watch your response times
An almost inescapable trend is that as Intercom usage goes up at a company, response times start inflating. Even Intercom themselves can’t escape it.
The best thing someone can do with your onboarding campaign is engage with it, and you should treasure those moments.
It does depend on the size of your company, but we strive for an average response of 5–10 minutes, and we’re able to do it because we loop our whole team into CS. To put extra emphasis on new users, we push messages from new users to the top of the queue. It’s a conscious trade-off.
The all important product tour- we scrapped it
Intercom and other competing tools have a feature called a “product tour.” The performance of a product tour is uncanny: empirically, we’ve seen that the average lifespan of a user who does a product tour is almost 20% higher than those who don’t.
But thinking like a small company, actually lead us to do something else that performed way better. This led us to stop doing robot-lead product tour…
Onboarding calls are the solution
You probably already do some form of onboarding call- your welcome email has a link to set up a 15 minute meeting, so if anyone wants it, they can have one.
But we’ve found that that’s not actually the best way to do onboarding calls, for a couple of reasons.
- Onboarding calls become something “extra”. Everyone has something to do besides them, and because they’re not consistently done, you often don’t have enough data to optimize them.
- Customers that opt into an onboarding call are probably already highly-engaged, so you’re doubling down on the customers that are likely to stay. This isn’t a bad thing (it is actually one of the best ways to get net promoters (https://www.netpromoter.com/know/). But the most likely to churn start out as disengaged and get worse over time.
- You get incomplete data on your customers. Getting the full picture of your entire customer base (use case, plans for the product, etc) is literally invaluable to setting your CS cadence in a unified way.
So at Correly, even though our account sizes are relatively small, and our product is simple by design, we switched to mandatory onboarding calls- users cannot use Correly without jumping on a meeting with our team. We’re not alone here: Superhuman, another small account size that has achieved viral growth hand-onboards every customer.
So what’s the anatomy a successful onboarding call? There are two main goals:
- Familiarize the customer with the product (this is especially important for technical products)
- Get data for you to provide the best customer support experience.
The latter is easily forgotten, but it’s the most important outcome of the call for us.
Typically, the customer already has background from sales or your funnel when coming into an onboarding, so we have found that limiting the amount that you’re talking about the product keeps engagement high.
Correly can help
A common way that onboarding calls are done nowadays is that the customer is made to share their screen, and the product expert will dictate to them what to do. While this works, we’ve actually found that being collaborative on a demo works even better. That’s why we built Correly.
When you’re on a Correly meeting, both participants can click and type on the same screen-share. This lets you be collaborative during your onboarding and support calls- you can point out things visually and they can execute themselves. If they get stuck, you can run the show for a bit.
Plus, we run the meeting on a secure, third virtual machine, so your client can even put in their real password and payment info. It’s just another way to make your customers love your product 😊
These are just our learnings from us refining our onboarding process. We were able to double our retention rate after two weeks by implementing the stuff here, and we would love to hear what else has helped yours!
So when is the moment that customers start churning? The answer is that customers start churning from the moment they sign up, and it takes discipline and dedication from your team to prevent it.
Check out Correly if your support calls need a kick in the butt.
