Our Favorite Customer Retention Tools

It's much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Cheap growth requires strong viral loops, a powerful community, or vibrant SEO—all of which take time and trust to cultivate. That’s why advertising to and converting new customers is expensive.

Even when your company has a repeatable acquisition flow, driving customers into a leaky bucket is a problem. That’s why customer retention is a prerequisite for growth. It’s true whether you’re at a small startup or a larger company: lowering your churn rate counteracts the cost of customer acquisition and increases customer lifetime value.

Why You Need to Optimize Your Customer Retention Strategy

Lowering your churn rate requires two aspects: keeping your customers happy so they stay loyal while improving your product so they spend more.

Finding plug-and-play tools that automate customer retention operations can save time and prevent your customers from going unnoticed.

Look out for something that can help your company:

• Increase customer retention.
• Facilitate continuous customer learning/education, AKA help customers find and solve their own problems.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses in your user experience.
• Capture reasons why your customers leave you.

Five Tools That Tackle Different Aspects of Churn

The tools we will look at fall into these categories, managing all aspects of the customer journey from onboarding to offboarding.

1. Nickelled ensures customer engagement during onboarding.
2. Zoho CRM enables continuous customer engagement.
3. Canny analyzes customer feedback and improves the user experience.
4. Churn Buster tackles payment failures behind involuntary or delinquent churn.
5. Churnkey gives you insight into customer churn and offers preventative measures that keep customers from leaving.

Nickelled

Getting customers onboarded quickly, effectively, and completely in the first few weeks will have a significant downstream effect. This has the potential to affect your revenue and profitability on a grand scale.

Nickelled is a cloud-based platform that requires no integration. It can easily be added to your product to give your customers step-by-step instructions that guide them through your onboarding process.

It has convenient customer support and scalability for businesses of all levels, types, and sizes. Features include:

Easy Guide Creation

Create code-free walkthroughs for onboarding your users with their guide creation tools.

Multi-channel Distribution

Distribute your guides via SMS, live chat, emails, website embedding, or active links in your FAQs.

Analytics & Feedback Collection

• Easily access analytics to track how your tutorials are being used.
• See how many people are viewing your guides/tutorials, their completion status, satisfaction ratings, and other important metrics.
• Place optional feedback surveys at the end of your tutorials to gage customer sentiment.

Zoho CRM

A solid CRM provides a comprehensive view of a customer's journey with your product or service. It naturally improves the customer experience by providing a single source for all customer information and interactions.

There are many CRMs in the market, ranging from highly customizable—therefore more complicated to use—to very expensive. Zoho CRM is a great choice because of its ease of use and scalable pricing structure. Features include:

360° Customer Overview

Access your contact profiles and see the history of all their activities and touchpoints, such as website visits, sales, social, help cases, emails, meetings, campaigns, and more.

Multi-Channel Monitoring & Creation

• Navigate through integrated channels, such as Projects, Marketing, Helpdesk, and Social. These are easily accessible from the main dashboard.
• Add social channels like Linkedin or Twitter with just a few clicks.

Email Composer Options

Create personalized emails with rich text format.

Comprehensive Reporting

Capture reports from leads and deals to activity statistics and email analytics with Zoho Advanced Analytics.

Canny

Customer feedback is a gold mine for uncovering ways to reduce churn. But analyzing it effectively can be a challenge. If you're like most SaaS companies, you'll get feedback from multiple stakeholders and platforms, and it can be overwhelming.

Canny is a feedback management platform with a flexible pricing structure and customizable features. Starting with a 14-day free trial, you can get actionable insights from 100 to 1000 to an unlimited number of tracked users per month. Features include:

Easy Feedback Collection

• Gather feedback manually or through their integrations.
• Collate feedback in one place, either publicly or privately.

Customized Feedback Analysis

• Enter your company's data to contextualize your feedback.
• Create segments with custom fields based on your business needs.
• Communicate with user segments to gain further insights.

Product Roadmap Priorities

Organize requests and projects and create your roadmaps accordingly.

Closed Feedback Loop

Communicate your progress to your customers and stakeholders to keep them engaged, and announce new features to increase adoption and usage.

Churn Buster

Involuntary Churn represents the percentage of your users who leave due to inactivity. This usually happens when there is a problem charging their credit card and their subscription is removed.

Churn Buster is a scalable solution for SaaS companies to minimize involuntary churn. Geared towards recovering failed payments, it targets Stripe payment issues caused by expiration dates, insufficient funds, card reissuance, etc. to improve the customer experience rather than detract from it. Churn Buster’s features include:

Customized Communication

• Take advantage of sending schedules to communicate at the right time to avoid annoying customers.
• Activate email or SMS campaigns in five minutes.
• Use a variety of email templates for high-quality email outreach.
• Send customizable brand emails to customers in HTML, text, or both.

Easy Card Updates

• Send your users to a mobile-optimized page with no login and real-time error handling to ensure payments are approved before they leave.
• Share secure card update links with your users.

Real-Time Reports

See all reports and analytics on a configurable dashboard.

Churnkey

Learning from customer churn is key to reducing it.

As a Stripe partner, we’re a non-intrusive integration that embeds into your SaaS product and handles your cancellation flow. Churnkey reduces churn by up to 42% with our personalized cancellation experiences.

In as little as 30 minutes, you can use Churnkey to increase your lifetime revenue thanks to:

Actionable Cancellation & Customer Insights

• See at a glance how healthy your customer base is.
• Understand the main reasons why they leave your product and what makes them stay.
• Keep an eye on accounts that seem to be thinking about leaving.

Tailor Cancellation Offers

Save customers the moment they cancel with dynamic offers designed to keep them subscribed.

Easily Customizable Interface

Change text, design, and flows, then go live instantly. Churnkey takes care of your cancelation flows so your developers can focus on other things.

Customer Segmentation

Segment your customer base to understand their specific pain points. A new customer who cancels a day after signing up should be treated differently than someone who has subscribed to your SaaS for years.

Session Playback

Understand how customers react to your cancelation process by replaying their process. Churnkey allows you to experience every hesitation, every lingering cursor, so you can create more enticing offers.

Subscription Breaks

Let customers who want to freeze their account come back at a later time.

Implement Customer Retention Tools Today

We've put together this guide to help you engage and monetize your customer base. At Churnkey, we want to empower you to know when, what, and why your customers are churning.

To deliver value to your customer base over time, you need a comprehensive set of solutions to retain customers throughout the customer lifecycle.

Without a focus on your churn rate, your business cannot be sustainable. It's much less costly to implement the tools to combat customer churn than it is to experience it.