NonRenewal/Churn

Amanda Watson

Hi! I am currently building a CS program from the ground up. One of the items I have been tasked with is to learn why our customers do not renewal (B2B software with annual renewals.) I am considering outsourcing a call campaign to nonrenewing customers to learn more about the reason for the churn.  Have any of you tried this? Any recommendations?

Thank you. I appreciate any feedback!

Andrew Marks

I've done this a few times for clients, being the outsourced vendor who performed these surveys. I think it's a great idea and we got a lot of great information from it. A few recommendations based on my experience:

1. Have an outsourced 3rd party do the work for you-always the best approach to get the most inciteful feedback
2. Keep the discussion to 30 minutes or less-so important not to take up too much time from someone who no longer wants to do business with you if you want to get some info from them
3. Incent them with a gift card in return for their time-$35-$50 Amazon/Starbucks/Whatever gift card is a great way to get them to bite
4. Come up with 3-5 open-ended questions-expect to get 2-3 answered so make sure you prioritize the list
5. Try and record every conversation-hearing the content AND the context...the emotion behind what they're saying-can be eye-opening.

Andrew

Anita Toth

Hi @Amanda Watson

Learning about why customers don't renew is incredibly powerful because what you learn can not only be used in CS but shared with marketing, sales and product.

Essentially, customer interviews provide deep insights that surveys, calls, discussions, emails etc just can't provide.

And hiring an outside provider allows for a degree of separation. This means customers can open up in ways they just don't when the interviews are run in-house.

Happy to talk to you about conducting these types of interviews  (It's what my company does ?).

Let me know if you're interested. 

P.S. Here's a LinkedIn post about the 25 Customer Churn Factors that impact a customer's decision to churn. These are the reasons why customer interviews are so important -- they help to identify which factors impact your customers the most.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anitamtoth_churncrusher-customersuccess-customerexperience-activity-6813455919477862400-nwSj

Daniel Hoesing

Hi Amanda, 

The interviews are great for capturing information and I agree with the outsourcer approach.  Ideally you would capture when the decision was actually made and then see if you could identify Customer behavior in your app or site that preceded the decision.  If you have a large enough sample, you can find things that might surprise you - sometimes they aren't intuitive.   Then you can address the symptoms before they kill the patient.    

If your product is integrated, another tip is to identify integration partners for each Customer.  I've worked with a lot of companies whose product teams worked really hard on the stand alone product, but didn't focus as much on the integrated one.  At first its a small fraction of Customers, but it can sneak up on you!  I would look for all of the internal common traits of lost Customers before conducting interviews.  That way, you can validate the information during the interviews! 

Good luck!

Amanda Watson

Wow, thanks for these great suggestions - I am adding these to the list. I never considered recording conversations to capture the emotion.

Amanda Watson

Thank you, Anita. I appreciate the resource! I will reach out soon.

Amanda Watson

Hi Daniel - YES! We are finding new ways to identify the risk of nonrenewal before it happens. Thank you for the great tips.