Best Customer Retention Software and Tools for Reducing Churn
Customer retention is key to your business’s longevity and profitability. It’s estimated that 80% of your total profits will come from just 20% of your current customers — but a typical American business will lose 15% of its customers each year.
Customer retention is no simple problem.
While this statistic can be a little fear-inducing, we’re here to reassure you that it doesn’t have to be such a gamble. Implementing customer retention software tools improves the overall customer experience, winning the hearts of your current customers and attracting new prospects to your brand offer.
In recent years, an ecosystem of customer retention software has sprouted to address this multifaceted problem.
We'll help you make sense of it in this guide, which covers 7 categories:
Billing analytics - Understand how customer retention affects the bottom line and track improvement over time.
Onboarding & feature adoption - Set up new customers for success and increase engagement of existing customers with in-app tours, tooltips and messaging.
Surveys & feedback - Collect actionable information in context, identify promoters and detractors.
Behavioral analytics - See what your customers are doing in your app.
Customer health - Combine data from multiple sources to get a complete picture of “customer health.” (No newfangled step-counting digital wristband required.) Then mine this data to predict which customers are at-risk.
Dunning - Resolve failed payments and delinquent accounts.
Offboarding - Reduce churn 10-30% by rerouting customers at the point of cancellation with relevant interventions.
Now that you have the bird’s eye view, let’s read on to learn more about the best customer retention software and tools that are redefining the industry, effectively reducing your expenses while boosting profitability.
What Is Customer Retention Software?
Customer retention software is a tool that improves customer retention over time. These tools often objectively measure their impact, comparing consumer trends and retention rates between set data points. This leaves you with the most accurate customer satisfaction metrics at any given time.
Key metrics that you’ll be able to track with this information can include:
Customer churn rate: This metric measures the rate customers disengage from a brand between two calendar dates. The general formula for this is (lost customers in a time period divided by total customers in a time period) x 100.
Customer lifetime value: Otherwise known as LTV, it reflects the total amount of money customers are expected to spend on a company's products or services over time (LTV = ARPU (average monthly recurring revenue per user) x customer lifetime).
Customer satisfaction: This metric quantifies your customer's satisfaction with your overall customer experience. This measure uses a one to five point system, with five indicating high satisfaction and one indicating the lowest possible level of satisfaction. To calculate this value, you’ll use the number of customers who rated you a four or five level rating, dividing it by the total number of customers being evaluated.
We get it — businesses have to retain their customers, or else there is no business! That’s why customer retention tools are designed to support products and services with a dynamic framework that results in better brand awareness and perception, improved customer experience and higher profitability overall.
Think of them like automated, infallible customer support tools that make your life easier while supporting higher revenue levels. If you ask us, that’s always a worthwhile investment!
Types of Customer Retention Software Tools
There are plenty of customer retention software tools out there — you just have to find the suite that suits your business’s current needs. Here are some tools to consider as you create and refine your customer retention systems:
It might take a while for those new tooltips to have a marked effect on churn rate. Improving retention through customer satisfaction is a long game, but that doesn't mean there aren't any quick wins.
Both dunning and offboarding solutions start cutting churn from day one.
If you haven't implemented these tools yet, jump there and get to it!
Billing analytics
These nifty customer retention software tools help to establish how customer retention affects your bottom line. By taking quantitative billing data, you’ll be able to see improvement trends over time and gauge the effectiveness of your customer retention systems.
Onboarding & feature adoption
Onboarding is one of the most important stages of a customer’s journey, laying the foundation for long-term retention and engagement. It’s also one of the most high-risk for customer attrition. Hubspot has found that 88% of clients have higher standards than in previous years for this stage, prompting many to take another look at what tools and steps are in place to cement customer loyalty.
There are plenty of tools that can “fit” in this category. Some of the most common examples are tools that guide the customer to a place where they’re ready to engage — shortening the learning curve and bringing them right to the point of engagement. Some examples of these tools include tooltips, messaging systems and in-app experiences.
Surveys & feedback
You won’t know how to serve your clients well without their input! Feedback tools are critical to many customer retention systems, keeping you “in the know” about what is and isn’t working.
Behavioral analytics
This lets you see how your customers engage with your content. You can use this to determine what they like and don’t like cost-effectively and efficiently!
Customer health
Don’t worry — there’s no smartwatch needed for this one. This tool harvests consumer data that allows you to determine which segments are thriving and which might be at risk for attrition.
Dunning
This tool is responsible for getting every bit of delinquent payment in, helping you retain profitability and longevity. Many of these tool types also resolve failed payments, possibly shaving time off your billing department’s workload.
Offboarding
Just as important as onboarding, off-boarding gives your customer a final “taste in their mouth” regarding your brand offering and experience. These tools work in two ways: streamlining the customer departure process to preserve brand perception or offering curated deals to win back consumers and lower attrition rates.
Next, let’s dive into our favorite tools.
Billing Analytics
Looking to determine how much retention is profiting (or costing) you? Look no further than billing analytics tools.
KissMetrics
Loved by companies like Lucidchart, Unbounce and Microsoft, KissMetrics offers a simple, user-friendly UI with smart dashboards and an extensive suite of integrations. They’ve been leading the charge since 2010, tracking over $10 billion in transaction volume for 10,000+ brands worldwide.
Companies can begin using the service for just $25.99/month or adopt a “pay-as-you-go” plan for just $0.0025/event.
Baremetrics
Baremetrics offers many services you’d see in KissMetrics, presenting them with colorful, user-friendly widgets and count boards rather than your traditional hard-to-read charts. This can be especially helpful for those who articulate information better when segmented and visually driven.
This tool is loved by SMBs and startups alike, working to recover failed payments (via charge assist measures) and giving strategic cancellation insights. After data is procured, users can use AI-created personalized email campaigns to attempt to retain the customer and win them back.
The tool has helped hundreds of business owners and finance departments, such as Statusbrew — a company that reduced churn and saved $10+ over three months.
Pricing starts at $129/month on a flexible basis based on a company’s current MRR.
Onboarding and Feature Adoption
When it comes to onboarding, there are many tools available that can help streamline the process and make it a more positive experience. Here are a few tools you can add to do just that.
Appcues
With Appcues, businesses can start boosting customer satisfaction for free — improving conversion rates and reducing the time spent before value is attained. Experts can create in-app experiences without engineering support, personalizing each effort by customer segment.
Plans start at $249/month, with three user licenses and an extensive pattern library.
Userpilot
This service offers contextual insights across the consumer journey while letting you capture feedback at each step. It’s the best of both worlds!
They are loved by hundreds of brands and known for delivering results quickly. For example: Kontentino was able to improve New User Activation Rates by 10% in just one month of use and also saw improvements in 1-week retention rates.
Plans start at $249/month — but users can enjoy a convenient free membership to get a taste of the tool suite.
Surveys and Feedback
Learn what your clients appreciate (and don’t) about your approach — and pivot accordingly with these tools.
YesInsights
This handy NPS tool is designed to improve your business with real-time customer feedback you can reference at any time. The one-click install, no-code framework especially appeals to SMBs and corporations wishing to remain agile.
GiveGrowSocial founder Micah Horner noted that it immediately cut down churn rate and cancellation substantially and they do highly recommend the service. They’re in good company, too — other customers who use YesInsights include MailChimp, DesignPickle, PredictableRevenue and more.
Users can start for as little as $20/month and are eligible for a 7-day free trial.
Instabug
This service is anything but a bother, helping your team to monitor and debug app performance on an ongoing basis. In short? It’s your stethoscope to the pulse of the quality of your digital service offering, harvesting real-time bug and app performance feedback.
The service supports some of the biggest apps in the game, such as Disney, Lyft, T-Mobile and more.
Their Standard plan starts at $200/month for 25K sessions.
Behavioral Analytics
Understanding customer behavior is key to business success. Analyzing interactions can reveal insights that inform marketing tactics and product improvements. See how your customers interact with every brand offering thanks to these options.
CleverTap
This platform offers some of the most comprehensive insights on the market, pulling from various customer inputs to synthesize clear, actionable data for future refinement. It’s trusted by Dominos, Sony, 7-Eleven and more and has won 6 G2 Summit awards in 2023 alone.
New users are eligible for a free trial and can sign on for as low as $99/month.
MixPanel
Consider this tool your user-friendly, visually-driven alternative to SQL-dominant layouts. You’ll be able to set custom metrics to track, instantly visualize trends based on user inputs and take action on decisions — all in one platform. The tool offers some of the most inclusive libraries of integrations on the market, making it a great option for larger brands or rapidly expanding SMBs.
Users can get started for free and stay on the free tier up to 20 million monthly events. After that, you can explore other options — such as the Growth tier for $20/month.
Customer Health
Tracking the social and engagement-related health of customers helps build loyalty and make informed decisions. Personalizing the experience can help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. Don't overlook these tools for measuring success.
Gainsight
Gainsight is all about ease — harnessing the power of AI and other digital advancements to deliver personalized customer service to your customers. Users save about 7 hours per team member per week after switching, and your clients will benefit from both the speed of AI and the power of the human touch.
Dealerware experienced a 2700% increase in NPS responses after swapping to Gainsight. And Notion (an industry leader in the personal management space) had a 25% increase in healthy customers due to the journey-savvy approach Gainsight takes.
Custom pricing is available upon request.
Pendo
On average, Pendo reports an average of 15% fewer support tickets, 30% more qualified leads and a 5% reduction in customer churn — all prompted by their streamlined native processes and without an ounce of help from your team members.
Their secret? Your consumers. The interface is built to encourage the production of only the elements your users really want — and it helps stakeholders to determine this with savvy in–app communications and efficient presentation of user-provided insights.
Pricing is available upon request.
Dunning
You don’t have to say goodbye to money in delinquent or outstanding accounts. While Prosperstack doesn’t specialize in dunning specifically, there are profitability-focused tools that can help.
Vindicia Retain
The subscription market can be complicated — and Vindicia estimates that subscription-based platforms retain just 82% of their clientele. That’s why they can step in when it comes to dunning, helping customers and brands resolve delinquent accounts (and giving you the data you need to make it all happen!).
On average, Vindicia recovers $187 per minute simply by reducing churn and optimizing your payment pathway. While their process mirrors that of other tools, they use AI-driven tech and other advancements to outperform — creating a holistic profitability strategy based on analysis of failed transactions, improving your subscription with the insights and effectively resolving failed payments.
Pricing is available upon request.
Gravy
Gravy appeals to brands looking for human-led support and expertise, bragging about a 30% higher recovery rate than tech-only processes. The process is entirely done for you and consists of strategic client communication management, access removal, incentive management and cancellation automation.
In other words? You’ll never have to lift a finger again. All specialists are U.S. based, so please consider that if you are working with international clients or represent an international brand.
Flat-fee pricing is available upon request.
Off-Boarding
When working on a customer retention strategy, there’s one sore spot that few people ever want to reference — off-boarding. While you can sometimes avoid this phase by addressing customers’ pain points, building five-star customer success teams and using the best customer retention software, it can’t always be dodged. SaaS companies can make the exit process a breeze with these helpful tools.
ProsperStack
Think of ProsperStack as your tool for subscriber retention done right. We offer extensive integration suites, the highest-quality support out there and about a thousand different incentive options you can use to encourage retention of your hard-earned customers. We're your service if you’re looking for A/B testing capabilities, customized exit survey insights, customer segmentation and a robust reporting panel.
When you sign on with ProsperStack, you can enjoy user-friendly, seamless and no-code solutions in just a few clicks. We’re trusted by some of the biggest names in the business (such as Hootsuite, Trainual, and more) — and we’re here to bring that expertise to your business. If you’re looking for a churn-preventing drop-in cancellation flow that knocks the others out of the park, look no further — you’ve found it!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
One honorable mention that didn’t make the list (but is still equally important) is your CRM — which could possibly be one of your most powerful solutions for customer retention for CS teams you have. Your customer relationship management (CRM) tool drives customer engagement, supports segmentation and communication with new customers and gives you the basal data you need to grow and refine your processes.
Here’s a short list of customer retention tool options we love.
Monday.com
The platform is already well-known and loved by tech companies, corporations and SMBs alike, thanks to its user-friendly interface and lack of a learning curve. With Monday.com, stakeholders can enjoy a full suite of services, including lead capturing, integration capabilities, contact management and more.
Pricing is relatively inexpensive compared to competitors, with many starting at just $14/month.
Airtable
This service is best known for its agility, visually-driven layout and ease of use. It functions similarly to Monday.com, with more data designation options, a no-code build process and native AI-driven workflows for maximum efficiency.
Users can begin for free, joining over 450,000+ companies that have switched to Airtable for their CRM needs.
The Future of Customer Retention Software
You know that retention is critical to your business’s ability to thrive — making it priority number one regarding profitability and revenue flow. Investing in the tools you need to prioritize customer engagement and retention now can save you millions down the line. There’s no time like the present!
If you haven’t already, we recommend looking at your current retention strategy and determining if any of the tools mentioned in this blog post might be a fit. We also recommend using ProsperStack as your customer retention management software.
While off-boarding is an often overlooked area of customer retention, it is often the most important. Your users have reasons for quitting — and this data not only drives your future innovation, but it can also be used to win them back. That’s where we come in — giving you a holistic solution that offers you subscriber retention done right.
ProsperStack uses a seamless start-up process, an extensive integration suite, hundreds of incentive optimization options and human-led support. (We bet your current tool can’t do it like we can!)
Request a demo with us to explore the future of customer retention and drop-in cancellation flow management.
Are we missing anything? Perhaps a brand new category of AI-powered, Cupid-inspired customer mind-control implants? Give us a shout.
