How to Prevent Churn and Drive Customer Growth?

Five (5) ways for Customer Success Managers to keep and grow their customers.

Even if you’re the best Customer Success Manager globally, it’s normal for your company’s clients to leave at a certain point. There may no longer be a need for your product or service, but there could well be many other issues that are causing the customer to consider not renewing that as a CSM, you should be able to handle effectively.  

There are many things you can do to keep customers around longer. Here are some of our top tips for getting clients through onboarding successfully and building a long-term relationship with them that keeps them wanting more. 

Method 1: Communicate Constantly 

As a Customer Success Manager, you should proactively contact your customers and assess their current position relative to their expected outcomes. What you need to know is… Are they currently facing any challenges in implementing your products or services, or are they at risk of doing so? There are many ways to communicate with your customers, such as: 

• Contact customers regularly, regardless of whether they have an issue or questions with their account and need support 
• Use chat software to communicate in real-time – this provides a way to hold a more in-depth type of conversation and allows you to build your relationship 
• Track all interactions via your Customer Success platform and use any available tools you have to automate tasks 
• Where possible, meet with them offline and talk with them face-to-face to develop your relationship with them even more. 
• Try calling them on the phone if they haven’t answered your emails. Sometimes they are simply busy and need a nudge! 

Understanding your customer is key to ensuring that you can provide exactly what they need and this, in turn, helps prevent churn.  Moreover, each interaction with the customer is an opportunity to get to know them, develop your relationship with them, make them happy, and increase the value they receive from their investment in your product or service. 

Method 2: Onboard Strategically 

It is critical for Customer Success Managers to onboard their clients strategically. Onboarding brings new customers into your product or service and gets them up and ready for the journey towards outcome attainment as swiftly and efficiently as possible. It includes everything from setting up account information, educating users on product use, documenting and publishing processes, communicating change, and connecting users with support options. To learn more about how onboarding works and the 7 phases of Customer Success, check out the Practical CSM Framework. 

The key takeaway is that you should be guiding your customers through the learning process for them to get value out of your product as quickly as possible. This is important because if customers don’t engage with your product early on, they are more likely to churn before realizing its value. The more efficiently you can onboard users, the better off you are when trying to retain customers long-term. 

Method 3: Share Knowledge 

You are the Customer Success Manager (CSM), and you know a lot about how things work in your domain. You have worked with different customers with their issues and needs and helped them attain their expected outcomes. You are an expert in solving problems and, more importantly, utilizing your company’s products or services in a way that best delivers value. Hence, sharing this valuable knowledge with your customers and your team is essential to ensuring that they are adequately equipped for outcome realization. 

Not only with customers and your team, but you can also share information with your partners to improve their understanding of your field of expertise and with suppliers that provide an opportunity to assess for possible improvements of what is currently implemented. 

Method 4: Automate Processes (to CS Leader)  

One of the best ways to grow your customer base is by automating processes that can be accomplished just as easily (or even more easily) through software. The following are some common areas where a Customer Success Manager might use automation: 

• Scheduling meetings and calls – automatically scheduling meetings and calls with customers based on their availability and time zone or communicating via email when you have an appointment or call planned. 
• Notifying people about upcoming events – sending out an email to all customers before an event, so they know what’s happening or sending out reminders when it’s getting close (and then again 3-5 days before). 
• Sending newsletters – using tools like HubSpot, Intercom, Salesforce Service Cloud, etc., you can create messages to send out either as part of your sales process (e.g., follow-up) or just general communications (e.g., “Here’s what’s going on”). 

However, the decision of whether to automate a process or not lies with your CS Leader. If you think that automation can bring benefits to the organization, the customers, and the implementation of CS strategies- you can consider recommending automation to your Customer Success Leader. You can learn more about what to automate here. 

Method 5: Collect Feedback 

As a Customer Success Manager, you must understand what the customers are thinking to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies. Is everything going well, or should you change your plan to better support the customer reach their goals? To do so, collecting feedback is necessary and could be done in numerous ways: 

• Use surveys and feedback tools that help you collect more information about what your customers want. When asking the questions, ask them to rate the importance of the feature on a scale of 1-5 or similar (1 being least important, 5 being most important). It’s better if you have a rating system so that it’s easier for customers to give their input. 
• You can also ask questions: What are the most important features you use? What are the most important features you don’t use? What features would you like to see in future versions? 

In conclusion. 

To be an effective Customer Success Manager, you should communicate with your customers meaningfully. Talk about their problems, how to solve them, and not just what your product or service can do for them. You are not a salesperson; you are a Customer Success professional that will lead to their desired destination. So, listen to the customers’ needs and provide a solution based on the identified and probable needs. Moreover, collaborating with other departments such as marketing or sales will help you ensure that all opportunities aren’t missed. 

The next steps, 

Now that you know a little about how to prevent churn and drive customer growth check out the best practices of Customer Success Management and ensure that your customers and company are on the road towards value attainment. Become an effective CS professional and improve your technique with our Certified Customer Success Management Professional (CCSMP) program.