Creating an effective customer journey to reduce customer churn

Acquiring and retaining new customers is a big challenge for companies across all sectors. Customers quitting your brand and departing unexpectedly are every managers’ worst nightmare.

Companies may proactively take action to persuade customers to stay by knowing what they want and recognizing tell-tale signals of upcoming churn. The journey mapping will make you discover issues and problems related to your company procedure due to which churn rate occurs. Therefore, it is necessary to learn how to reduce the customer churn of your business by creating a successful customer journey.

What is the customer churn rate?

The customers who left your firm or switched to your rival over a particular time frame are the customers that have churned. Churn is the answer to the question “how frequently do your customers utilize the cancel button?”

The churn rate is one of the essential core KPIs to examine in a subscription business. For example, the churn rate was 1.98% of Sprint Corporation for postpaid subscribers in the third quarter of 2019. Usually, industries that adopt a subscription-based marketing strategy have tended to concentrate on churn than others.

Customer churn and customer journey are important aspects of customer service. Learn more on this topic:

➡️ What must you know about omnichannel vs. multichannel customer service

➡️ How customer service chatbots increase customer satisfaction

➡️ How to use omnichannel to improve your customer retention

How to calculate the customer churn rate

The journey maps show the path customers take through their purchasing process. It gives companies valuable insight into how they can reduce churn. But why is attrition so essential to companies in the first step? The quick answer is that it is too expensive for customers to quit performing business with you. In a written form: it is written as the total loss divided by the total number of customers of a specific session. And mathematically form of this written form can be presented as:

Customer Churn Rate = (Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period) x 100

For example; If you had 700 customers at the start of the session, and at the end of that session, 35 customers left your firm, you would have a 5% churn rate. Noticing that, any new sales would not be included in this data. However, such customers would be included in the analyses for the coming timespan.

What is a customer journey?

The journey that a customer takes during their whole life span is called a customer journey or user mapping. It helps companies understand how customers interact and engage along the marketing touchpoints. Customer journey mapping will be used to identify areas that need improvement and as a tool to create a roadmap for improving the overall customer experience.

This mapping begins with corporate brand recognition, becoming a frequent client for many years, and finally departing for a rival. The most important aspect of this journey is determining what actions or strategies the firm is taking to sustain customers' happiness and how it will increase customer satisfaction to keep those customers for a longer time. To determine where your consumers churn, you must first map out their whole experience, from beginning to an end.‍

The customer journey maps the whole purchasing process, including emotions that the customer may feel through it. These emotions may be in the form of aggression, happiness, or excitement. In reducing the negative sentiment, a journey map pinpoints your customer's experience and helps to resolve the problem.

There is not a single company on the planet that never managed to lose a customer. So, the customer journey will help handle it differently. Some quickly begin hunting for new clients to compensate for the damage while others devote all of their resources to determining what happens and how to keep others from fleeing.

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The importance of mapping your customer journey

It’s crucial for every business to have a clear view and understanding of their own customer journey, from start to finish. Here’s why:

1. Customer journey helps you in making long-term customers.
2. It assists in detecting and solving your customer problems.
3. Through the customer journey, you identify the demand and interest of your customer.
4. It will show which strategy performs better to reduce the churn rate.

How to optimize your customer journey to reduce churn

The biggest mistake companies make when it comes to customer journey mapping is overlooking the role of data. As a best practice, organizations should utilize data for every step of their journey mapping process. The more details you have at your disposal, the easier it will be for you and your team to map out new opportunities and measure the impact of these changes.

By emphasizing lowering customer churn, the average customer lifetime value will improve. According to the data, improved conversion rates were highlighted by 63% of study respondents as the critical advantage of customization, while improved e-commerce revenues were reported by 31%.

1. Analyze the causes of customer churn

A clear and complete understanding of the customer journey is an effective way to reduce customer churn rate. By analyzing the causes of churn, one can identify which elements need improvement, due to which they can make the cause-effect relationship clearer. It will allow you to make corrective changes in your processes. Moreover, it will assist in understanding how customers come into your business and how they depart.

Customer journey mapping helps identify vital factors that influence how customers interact with your company and their needs after interacting with your company. Conducting a customer journey mapping analysis on your business can help to identify which experiences lead to customers leaving and what actions need to take to increase retention rates. In addition, discover any existing weaknesses or gaps in the customer journey map that can address your business to achieve its objectives.

2. Make good on your promises and present high-quality products

Customer journeys map out customer experiences after purchasing your brand product. Every buyer has certain expectations of a brand., so you should not only meet their demands but can also deliver value. The golden rule is: be truthful and satisfy the expectations while raising the pitch when possible. Enhance your products by clearing all the useless entanglement from the products. Things that will help your business to maintain customer satisfaction are creating customer mapping and knowing what features they like more in your products.

By knowing your customer's needs, make the product according to the wishes and demands of the customers. And ensure to far-off your customer's concern as soon as possible. Go through the market research and check out your competitor's strategies. And make such strategies from which you can enhance your product quality more than your opponents. For example, about 56% of customers favored cheap delivery costs over lower online product prices in Poland.

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3. Keep customers engaged

Connecting with your customers regularly is one of the best strategies to reduce your company churn rate. By creating an ideal strategy for your customer interaction, the customer journey assists in finding how many customers churn are happening and the reason behind that before the client leaves you.

First, build an easy-to-use onboarding program to minimize churn throughout the early phases. You can find your customers through LinkedIn and extract email addresses. Then, use such tactics to run a successful cold email campaign to maintain communication with your customers. To begin, present enough and innovative material regarding your product's main practical benefits, as well as regular news feeds such as announcements of sales, promotional deals, or future improvements.

4. Collect customer insights

Ask for feedback, complaints regarding the products, and what innovations they want to see in your products. It is the most powerful strategy in engaging your customers with your business. Customer journey maps assist in providing different techniques that make the customers stick with your firm. Creating polls and doing honest surveys will also help know customers’ insights.

The genuine feedback from the polls and surveys assists what customers think about your business and how to make your product quality better according to your customer’s demands. Problems will be solved effectively and quickly based on this result. The churn rate of Vodafone prepaid fluctuated from 20% to 54.3% from the first quarter of 2014/15 to the first quarter of 2021/22.

5. Improve your conversion rates

There are many ways to increase the likelihood of retaining new customers. Likewise, there are many approaches that companies can use to help them improve their retention rates. For example, companies can use customer journey mapping and 360-degree customer interviews to understand their customers better. A customer journey map helps companies understand the order in which people arrive at a point in their purchase journey. It also helps them understand what motivates people to make purchases at different stages of their journey, and how these factors shape a customer’s decision when it comes to purchasing a product or service.

In addition, customer journeys can use as a basis for creating innovative solutions. It guides the flow of customers through the purchase process, such as by providing access to products and services that suit their needs or making it easier to navigate. Conversely, by providing consumers with more personalized shopping experiences that meet their needs, you can improve your overall shopping experience by reducing churn rates and improving your conversion rates. Globally, around 55% of experts in the automotive industry said that their staff is intensely engaged in providing a good customer experience (CX).

6. Concentrate on making your brand stand out

By concentrating on making good quality products to make your brand stand out, you'll be able to attract more clients while also ensuring their long-term loyalty. It will significantly help you create a long-lasting relationship and preserve the brand's individuality. An engaged customer base, of course, is a component that sustains a business, and it is more crucial in this competitive day.

Now companies are taking different initiatives to provide ultimate satisfaction to their customers. For example, they are using QR codes in their contactless advertising initiatives to strengthen the post-purchase satisfaction of the customer. In reality, any company or individual may generate a QR code using a reliable QR code generator.

7. Take actions to reconquer customers from your competitors

It is essential to focus on needs, wants, and desires to keep new customers. It will help them decide to stay. And while it is a good idea to provide them with all the bells and whistles that might encourage them to stick around. However, there are numerous ways that you can also go about winning over their interest.

The customer journey map is one of the most effective means of doing just that. It helps companies understand how people make decisions about buying from them, what motivates them, and which barriers they might have overcome to make the purchase easier or more convenient for them in the future.

You must respond quickly to recover customers who have lately engaged with your opponents—rethinking your price strategy. Maintain a competitive edge based on the value it provides. Understand your rival's pricing strategies. As well as how they market their packages and promotional deals? It will let you see things from a different viewpoint. The churn rate can be reduced by boosting up the revenue and profit of your company. Examine the impact of turnover on other KPIs having customer lifetime value, recurring income, and customer retention expenses. Make targets for customer churn rates and check whether they improve over time or not. If not, rethink your retention approach and try new strategies.

8. Determine which customers are at-risk

Stopping churn and making your customers loyal not only in the present time but also in the future is one of the biggest tasks for the firm. The strategies for taking precautionary measurements to prevent churning are only possible if you identify the ideas behind a customer journey mapping process. It is effective for two types of companies – service providers and consumer brands. And by knowing what kind of demand and requirements of your product are not fulfill? And how to resolve this situation?

So, how can you identify consumers at risk by using customer journey mapping? Customer mapping shows the slow conversation rate. And it helps to identify the reasons, resolve the problems, and take necessary actions to lower high-risk customers. Understanding which customers are at risk of churning enables customer success teams to engage with these customers proactively. Frequent connections with your customers benefit in lowering churn.

Conclusion

Enhance your strategies regarding customer engagement, lower high-risk customers, product quality, and educate your customers by creating a successful customer journey. It is simple to neglect churn, but the consequences may be devastating. Identify your company's churn factors and create a successful retention approach. Taking the necessary actions at the perfect time, you can significantly minimize the churn rates. 53.7% of companies said that increasing customer satisfaction and value are only possible by improving customer experience (CX) capacity. 

You can significantly minimize your churn rate by taking the required steps at the ideal time you can dramatically reduce the churn rates. The best place to begin is to invest in the right tools to help you develop deeper customer relationships and provide more value to consumers. Then, once your customers connect with you, follow the directions and improve consumer strategy statistics. It will surely help you comprehend the bigger picture of why tracking and minimizing customer churn is so important.

Author Bio

Akshay is a digital marketer and a startup enthusiast exploring the myriad avenues of everything marketing. At Beaconstac, he enables companies to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds through the use of custom QR codes. 

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