Monitoring Subscriber Churn? Here are 3 Absolute Must-Dos

Subscriber churn. It’s an important metric for measuring the health of any service provider’s business. And it is especially critical to monitor how, when and why customers are cutting ties with your business if you are in a highly competitive market.

Nick Colton, Director of Technical Support at ALLO Communications, summed it up perfectly recently, “At ALLO we believe in providing an exceptional customer experience.  The ability to identify and resolve customer issues proactively, before the customer calls in or churns off, is imperative.”

That means there needs to be a shift in how we view and tackle churn. Here are three things to consider when you are monitoring churn.

It’s more than a number.

There are several formulas businesses use to calculate churn. They can become so complicated that at last count, there were more than 40 different methods. Very often, the focus becomes the minutia of the metric itself – what is the number, does it mean what we think it means, is it accurate, etc.

Instead, look at churn as an insight into your subscriber experience. Analyze the subscriber behavior, understand what’s triggering their departure, establish what needs to change, and how you can get ahead of losing customers. Investigate what’s behind the number and focus on how to apply the metrics in a meaningful way that actually helps you address churn.

It’s an opportunity.

Most service providers accept churn as a given and attempt to negate it by increasing customer growth rate to ensure the business is growing steadily. Several studies show that while most businesses agree that it is cheaper to retain than acquire new customers, only 18 percent focus on retention programs versus 44 percent on acquisition.

But if that is where efforts stop, you’re missing huge revenue opportunities. Existing customers are 50 percent more likely to try new products/services and spend 31 percent more when compared to new customers. Investing in customer retention should be a no-brainer.  

It’s everyone’s responsibility.
Several subscription-based service companies are beginning to invest in customer success teams to reduce churn and increase customer stickiness. Though it is a move in the right direction, customer success teams cannot do it alone.

Ingrain retention practices into every business function. Think how installers deliver the right first-impression, how the support center responds when a customer calls in with a problem, or how marketing teams better engage with existing subscribers with customer experience initiatives.

But without the right tools, none of this is easy. Most service providers do not have teams of data scientists who can wrangle big data into sensible, actionable information and insights. There is no way to predict who will stay and who will go, let alone craft a strategy to keep subscribers from leaving in the first place.

At Calix, with our purpose-built cloud platform for service providers, we have designed solutions for empowering marketing and support organizations to proactively monitor and manage subscriber experience. 

According to Nick, whose team currently uses Calix Support Cloud, “with the Call Avoidance Reporting feature we can identify customers with potential service issues and proactively work with the customer to fix the issue, in many cases before the customer even notices an issue.”

With relevant subscriber and network intelligence at their fingertips, your CSRs and marketing experts too can become your most powerful allies in reducing churn.

To learn more, visit Calix Cloud.