Grow Revenue with Customer Retention Automation at Scale
Customer retention automation streamlines customer-focused activities that drive retention, growth and revenue.
For high-volume subscription-based businesses, customer retention is a must. Software automation options include user onboarding widgets, behavioral analytics, customer health reporting, subscription dunning and cancellation flows. More on these below.
What is customer retention automation?
The subscription business model provides plenty of built-in advantages—like more predictable revenue streams and the chance to create long-term customer relationships. But there are some disadvantages, too.
For example, to achieve long-term growth and profitability, retaining existing customers becomes essential. To do it right requires significant investment of time and money. Software automation can simplify, streamline and optimize many of these tasks, freeing up resources for higher-priority activities.
What are the benefits of automating customer retention?
While a small team can manually monitor the success of a handful of clients, this kind of hands-on approach doesn’t scale. Customer retention automation solutions remove human effort from the equation, resulting in greater scalability and cost-effectiveness. Here are just a few reasons you should be using automated customer retention software.
More predictable and stable revenue streams
Shifting from a pay-once model to subscription-based billing allows better insight into your revenue forecast. If customers don’t leave, you can count on that ongoing revenue. In turn, a subscription model reduces your volatility because revenue is no longer tied solely to new customer acquisition. As you lose fewer customers, your overall profitability improves, and your ability to predict future revenue becomes easier.
Optimize the customer experience
The data gathered from behavioral analytics and cancellation surveys means you’ll no longer have to guess why a customer didn’t renew. You can identify trends to improve your product, business and customer experience on a broad scale. And you can leverage user-specific intel to tailor your response for each customer.
Improved product-market fit
Many people believe that your customer retention rate is the single best indicator of product-market fit. Why? Because if your customers continue to renew, it means they find lasting value in your product. Let’s extend that perspective even further. By understanding why your customers leave, you can identify opportunities to improve your product and add even more customer value.
Insights to help the whole team
Customer retention automation benefits your entire organization. The data helps customer success managers understand why customers leave and gives them a reason to reach out to at-risk customers. Your marketing team can tailor winback campaigns based on why customers have left. And your product team will have the data they need to identify problems like bugs, missing features or product performance correlated to customer churn.
Types of customer retention automation
Because customer retention spans your entire organization, the options for automation are many:
User onboarding & feature adoption - Set up new customers for success and increase engagement of existing customers with in-app tours, tooltips and messaging.
Behavioral analytics - Track what your customers are doing in your app to discover trends and common problems that can be addressed.
Customer health - Combine data from multiple sources to get a complete picture of “customer health.” Then mine this data to predict which customers are at-risk.
Dunning - Automatically resolve failed payments and delinquent accounts.
Cancellation flows - Collect feedback and reduce churn at the point of cancellation with targeted alternatives.
User onboarding & feature adoption
User engagement and time to value are critical aspects of customer success.
For new customers, this means guiding them to achieve their desired outcome.
For existing users, increasing feature adoption is the name of the game. When you help customers maximize their value, they’ll most likely remain satisfied customers for the long haul.
While customer success managers serve a role here, onboarding automations can drive engagement at scale with in-app tooltips, tours, walkthroughs, launchers, banners, notifications, lightboxes and hotspots. You also get feature-rich reporting and powerful segmentation with hosted software that you probably will never see from a home-grown solution.
Learn more about automated user onboarding.
Behavioral analytics
Like Google Analytics for your app, behavioral analytics capture the raw data of user interaction (e.g. clicks, navigation, form submissions) and condense it into meaningful information, whether as high level reports or individual user timelines.
Behavioral analytics help you identify which features customers are using (or not) and where they get stuck, so you can resolve issues and help your customers achieve success.
For example, insurance company Lemonade pinpointed a major conversion dropoff: customers were filling out a complex form but most people didn’t submit it. Looking closer, they found a bug on this page and noticed a wishy-washy CTA. When these issues were resolved, conversions increased 50%.
Learn more about behavioral analytics tools.
Customer health
While support tickets and NPS can help identify customers that are liable to churn, 96% of unhappy customers won't complain to you before seeking alternatives from your competitors. Customer health software uses data analysis and machine learning to automate the identification of these at-risk accounts, as well as highlighting your most satisfied customers.
Customer health dashboards present a comprehensive picture of a customer’s engagement with your product and brand across all channels, including in-app behavior, support tickets and social media. By integrating data from all these sources, customer health software provides a timeline view of customer engagement activities and can proactively alert you about important events.
Learn more about customer health scoring.
Subscription dunning
Automated dunning software is the solution to involuntary churn.
Involuntary churn describes subscriptions lost due, not to active customer dissatisfaction, but to billing failures like credit card expiration, insufficient funds, or suspected fraud. These failures can account for up to 40% of subscriber churn.
Dunning software performs automatic retries of failed payments and automates the process of communicating with customers to resolve payment issues, recover lost revenue and resume subscriptions. Dunning sequences typically use email or SMS.
Learn more about automated subscription dunning.
A notable dunning alternative is Gravy, which uses the human touch of US-based retention experts. Gravy boasts a 30% higher recovery rate than tech-only processes.
Cancellation flows
With automation, you can actually turn your cancellation process into a growth lever. We’ve seen this firsthand in our work with subscription-based businesses, yet many companies still overlook this big opportunity. Perhaps they don’t realize the role this type of automated customer retention can play in decreasing churn and growing revenue.
Think of your cancellation UI as a churn funnel that acts as your last chance to retain customers. By reinforcing value and offering alternatives to cancellation, you can persuade 10-39% of customers to stay.
Cancellation flow software like ProsperStack Retain makes getting up and running quick and easy. Analytics, A/B testing and AI tools help you optimize performance over time to maximize ROI above and beyond in-house solutions.
Additionally, by integrating with your billing platform, cancellation flow software can automate subscription modifications such as applying coupons, changing plans, pausing accounts or extending trials. This puts ownership in the hands of customer-facing teams instead of developers, allowing them complete flexibility when creating, editing and optimizing offers.
Automated retention with ProsperStack
Trusted by high-volume subscription brands like Nutrafol, Hootsuite, and Roll20, ProsperStack Retain is a hosted, low-code cancellation flow solution that blends seamlessly into your site. It’s simple to get started:
Connect your subscription platform — Connect Stripe, Chargebee, Recurly, Paddle and more to fully automate subscription cancellation, pauses, trial extensions, coupons, etc.
Embed into your site — Seamlessly integrate the ProsperStack cancellation flow directly into your product with minimal dev time. Start with a cancellation flow template based on best practices and customize to suit your unique needs by mixing and matching reusable components.
Learn from cancellations — Collect actionable data from customers when they cancel. Fully customizable with a few clicks.
Prevent churn with offers — Automatically present coupons and other incentives to retain customers based on their answers and segments. Optimize with A/B testing, AI, customer segmentation and robust reporting.
Analyze and win back — Use the insights you've gathered to improve your product and re-market to lost customers.
With ProsperStack Retain, you’ll:
Respond quickly — Make revisions to your cancellation flow at any time, no developers necessary. Just a few clicks and you’re done.
Tailor interventions with sophisticated rules — The best offer is the one your customer actually wants. With segmentation you can target offers to customers based on their exit survey answers, subscription info, CRM/CDP data and more. For example, you can segment based on:
How long they’ve been a subscriber
The reason they’re canceling
Likelihood you can win them back
Continually improve with A/B testing and AI — Put different offers head-to-head to find the best performers using powerful A/B tests and Autopilot offers.
Develop win-back strategies that are most likely to convert — Armed with data about what customers are the most profitable and why they’ve opted to leave, you can determine the best incentive to win them back, including discounts. But it isn’t always about price. Perhaps a feature you’re just about to roll out is something they’ve been wanting, and an offer to be an early beta tester will be the push they need to give your product another chance.
Surface opportunities to add value — Customers keep their subscriptions when they feel they’re getting good value for the price. So, even though subscriptions are designed to build long-term relationships, you must continually look for ways to add and then showcase even more value. Exit surveys provide real insights into what’s really driving churn.
Ready to get started?
Building a thriving subscription business is hard work, but it’s easy to integrate an automated customer retention flow into your customer retention efforts. Really easy.
Your hosted cancellation flow from ProspersStack can be live within hours—at work retaining customers, reducing churn and growing revenue. Get a demo.
