Top Software for Churn Prevention
Customer acquisition is only half the battle. It’s critical that companies work to keep customers over the long term, or risk losing them to churn.
Churn describes the rate at which customers are lost over time. When churn is high, much of a business’s customer acquisition efforts go to simply replacing lost customers, instead of growth. The question is, what steps can be taken to prevent churn, so your business continues to grow at a healthy rate?
One answer is churn prevention software. These tools help companies reduce churn and boost customer retention. This article explores the various types of churn, what factors lead to customer attrition and how churn prevention software can help, including the key features to look for and the top 10 churn prevention offerings available today.
What Is Churn Prevention Software and How Can It Help?
To fully understand what churn prevention software is and why it’s necessary, one must first comprehend customer churn and why it’s so detrimental to a company’s revenue growth.
Types of Churn
There are several categories of churn, including voluntary and involuntary, customer churn and revenue churn, and others.
Customer Churn
Customer churn refers to the rate at which existing customers stop doing business with a company within a specific period. It measures the percentage of clients who discontinue or leave the service, highlighting customer retention challenges and the impact on business growth and revenue.
Revenue Churn
Revenue churn, in contrast, refers to the financial loss from canceled subscriptions, downgrades or lost customers within a particular timeframe. It reflects the decrease in recurring income due to customer attrition or reduced spending, which naturally affects a company’s overall revenue stream.
Factors Contributing to Churn
There are various reasons why SaaS companies and other online businesses might experience churn. A primary purpose of churn prevention software is to identify these issues so companies can address them and consequently reduce SaaS churn. Some common factors include:
Customer Dissatisfaction
Naturally, when customers aren’t happy, they go elsewhere. This erosion in customer loyalty ultimately increases churn risk, resulting in lost business over time.
Lack of Engagement
When customers stop using a company’s product or service as much as they used to or use it less than the average user, they become officially disengaged. Unless concrete attempts are made to re-engage and retain customers like these, they will likely leave for alternatives.
Competitive Factors
Another common reason for churn is when another company does something better. Perhaps it offers lower prices, higher quality or more innovative features, enticing customers to switch to them.
Importance of Churn Prevention
Without a doubt, it is wise for a company to actively manage and take steps to reduce customer churn. Several of the reasons why are examined in more detail below.
Increasing Revenue and Business Growth
Here’s the deal: using software to analyze customer data to pinpoint reasons for churn and making changes accordingly helps businesses retain revenue from existing clients, increasing customer lifetime value and lessening acquisition costs. Loyal customers tend to spend more, refer others and stabilize income streams so companies can focus on expansion, catalyzing their overall growth.
It’s also possible to upsell and cross-sell complimentary products to satisfied customers, increasing revenue.
Reducing Customer Churn Rate
Preventing churn leads to a lower customer churn rate, which generally means more profit, increased long-term stability and improved customer health (i.e., fewer at-risk users). Churn prediction software also provides valuable insights into user behavior derived from customer data, which can be used to shape business strategies.
Building Long-Term Customer Relationships and Enhancing Customer Experience
Many churn management programs collect customer feedback via NPS and monitor the customer health score and other retention metrics. All this information can enhance the user experience and strengthen customer relationships.
Identification of At-Risk Customers
Powered by AI, churn prediction software analyzes large datasets to determine which customers are at-risk of leaving and why, allowing businesses to take action to retain them, substantially increasing their revenue and growth.
Features to Look for in Churn Prevention and Prediction Software
Given that a high churn rate translates into the hemorrhaging of customers — and, therefore, profit — most companies have a vested interest in addressing customer churn.
One of the best ways to do this is by using churn prevention software, a customer success platform that enables businesses to identify, predict and combat churn. Look for these features when evaluating churn prevention software.
Analytics and Tracking
It’s crucial that the software closely tracks customer behavior and other data points so businesses can see which users are at risk of canceling or leaving. In other words, customized dashboards filled with rich analytics, like those provided by ProsperStack, allow companies to determine which customers might churn so they can make every effort to retain them.
Segmentation and Personalization
Any churn prevention software worth its salt should also allow businesses to segment their users. Why?
So they can customize different aspects of the customer journey to boost customer satisfaction. After all, customers whose needs are being met will want to stick around for the long term.
User Engagement
High-quality software provides user engagement tools so companies can more easily engage/re-engage new, old and even inactive customers. ProsperStack, for instance, helps its clients define key subscriber segments using billing, CRM and other data, implement sophisticated offer rules to target customers with personalized offers, and then uncover valuable insights to drive continual optimization.
Integration Capabilities
A churn management program should integrate with the tools a business already uses. For example, ProsperStack’s retention and churn platform works with Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Braintree, Maxio, Recurly, Zuora, Shopify, Recharge and Bold, as well as the following CRMs: HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom and Segment.
Scalability
As a business grows, it needs its churn prevention software to grow with it. The program should remain stable and reliable despite any changes in workload volume.
Real-Time Alerts and Notifications
One of the best ways for a company’s customer success team to prevent churn is to receive real-time alerts about at-risk customers. This allows them to save users by quickly fixing their problems and attempting to delight and satisfy them before they decide to move on.
Predictive Analytics Capabilities for Churn
Finally, software options like ProsperStack help businesses predict customer behavior via analytics and other data points. It’s like having a crystal ball that foretells the future when it comes to churn — and what company doesn’t want that?
The 10 Best Churn Prediction Software
The list below dives into 10 of the best churn management software options available on the market today. SaaS businesses that take advantage of all these services will likely experience significant churn reduction and a resulting uptick in their recurring revenue and business growth.
ProsperStack
ProsperStack stands out from the rest on this list because of all it has to offer: the easiest setup, the most dedicated support, the most comprehensive optimization options (A/B testing capabilities, exit survey components, customer segmentation, robust reporting insights and more) and lots of ways to integrate it into a company’s current tech stack.
It’s clients can react quickly to prevent cancellations based on its timely and meaningful insights, resulting in higher retention and increased profits.
Akkio
Next on this list of churn management software is Akkio, which bills itself as scalable, easy-to-use and affordable. It utilizes AI to help companies make decisions in real-time.
Churnly
Then there’s Churnly. This churn prediction service uses machine learning to analyze customer data and identify at-risk customers so its clients can implement tailored retention strategies.
Qualtrics XM
Founded in 2002, Qualtrics XM refers to itself as an “experience management platform,” focusing on predicting what users will do next. Although the tool can prevent churn, clients also use it to perform product concept analysis and more.
Userpilot
Nevada-based Userpilot helps teams personalize in-app experiences within the customer journey. It aims to increase retention and user engagement (thereby reducing churn) by improving onboarding processes and more via customized and dynamic “flows.”
GainSight
In this list of churn management tools, GainSight is more commonly referred to as a customer service management platform since its services are broader than just preventing churn. The business helps companies manage and optimize their customer relationships to boost retention and revenue via analytics and automation.
Segment
Twilio subsidiary Segment uses AI to compile, clean and utilize first-party customer data to create customized user experiences. Furthermore, the collected data informs decisions, monitors performance and helps companies better understand their users.
Vitally
Vitally enables its B2B SaaS clients to connect data between various tools in their tech stacks so they can measure net revenue retention (NRR), decrease churn and boost productivity. It offers clients alerts, analytics and automation.
ChurnZero
Committed to “helping subscription businesses fight customer churn,” ChurnZero offers automation, health scoring, in-app communication, reporting and revenue forecasting so customer success teams can deliver more value and drive more revenue.
Retently
Retently gathers customer feedback via surveys that clients use to measure customer satisfaction, create workflows and support decision-making. The company is well-known for its excellent customer support.
The Essential Role of Churn Prevention Software in Business Success
Companies simply can’t afford to ignore churn. No matter how proficient they are at acquiring new customers, achieving or maintaining high growth is nearly impossible if those users don't stick around. Moreover, high churn usually signifies something wrong — maybe customer service isn’t up to par, the value proposition is inadequate or the company’s marketing isn’t working.
Whatever the case, implementing churn prevention software is the best way to diagnose problems and fix them — ultimately decreasing churn and boosting profit.
If your company is serious about improving retention, ProsperStack is the way to go. Get a free demo today.
