6 Best Churn Prevention Software : Expectations vs. Reality

Churn might just be the most dreaded term in the entire SaaS industry. After all, it’s the direct obstacle to growth. 

And while churn is not entirely avoidable, the good news is that it can be minimized and prevented to an extent — especially if you’re armed with the right tools. 

For this article, we have compiled a list of the best churn prevention software that can help you prevent your existing customers from slipping through the cracks and make sure your new customers stick around. 

What is churn?

Customer churn occurs when your customers stop doing business with you — as simple as that. In other words, it’s the rate at which you lose a certain number of customers over a certain period of time. 

Churn can happen for a variety of reasons at any stage of your customer’s journey with your product or service. However, it usually falls under one of two general categories: 

• Voluntary churn, as the name suggests, happens when your customers take a voluntary, conscious decision to stop doing business with you. This could be because they no longer require your services or because they can get a better deal than one of your competitors. 
• Involuntary churn occurs when you lose your customers even though they have no intention of abandoning your business. It is usually accidental and often happens because of technical issues, such as a failed payment due.

How do you calculate customer churn?

As we mentioned, customer churn is usually expressed as a rate of how many customers you lose over a specific time period. 

To calculate your customer churn rate, first, you need to divide the number of customers you lost within that time period by the number of customers you had at the start. Then, multiply that number by 100, and get your customer churn rate!

For example, let’s say you want to find your churn rate for the past year. At the beginning of the year, you had 400 customers, and at the end of the year, you had 375 customers — meaning you lost 25 customers. 

Divide 25 by 400, multiply the figure by 100, and you get 6.25% — your annual customer churn rate. 

But is a 6.25% annual churn rate reasonable? As a matter of fact, it is — the annual churn rate benchmark for SaaS business falls between 5% and 7%, while a good monthly rate should be under 1%. 

Why is churn prevention essential?

Churn prevention is essential for two reasons. 

First, while it may not be possible for you to fully prevent your customers from churning (especially when it comes to voluntary churn), a large portion of churn is actually avoidable. Moreover, that portion has a more significant impact on your growth and revenue than you may think. Avoidable customer churn is costing U.S. businesses $136 billion a year.

Second, preventing customer churn is simply cost-effective all thanks to one of the most fundamental best practices in any business — keeping current customers is cheaper and easier than finding new ones. 

Repeat customers can bring you 67% more money than new customers, while a 5% increase in your customer retention can boost your revenue by as much as 25%. 

In other words, preventing customer churn is a must if you’re looking to grow your revenue. 

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Top 6 churn prevention software

Remember when we said that you need to have the right tools to successfully prevent customer churn? Here are our top picks for churn prevention software that will help you do just that!

1. Custify

Custify is a comprehensive customer success platform and churn prevention software built from the ground up to help SaaS businesses reduce churn, better understand their customer lifecycles, proactively manage customer health, and more. 

Custify’s platform can be integrated with some of the leading CRM, project management, and billing solutions. It also relies on customer success workflow automation to help SaaS companies manage their customers effectively and efficiently. 

Best features:

• Customer 360 — access all customer data from various sources and platforms in one interactive dashboard
• Customer health score — monitor the overall satisfaction of each customer based on chosen KPIs
• Concierge onboarding support — set up and start using Custify in a matter of hours with the unique concierge onboarding support

Starting price: On request

2. Retain by Profitwell

A part of Profitwell’s portfolio of revenue automation products, Retain helps subscription-based companies prevent customer churn by predicting and reducing payment failure.

Retain combines Profitwell’s algorithms that analyze data points on failed payments and cancellation flows with a personalized approach to churn prevention strategies. With Retain, you can improve your customer recovery rate and reduce involuntary churn.

Best features: 

• Cancellation flows analysis — reduce the subscription cancellation rate among your customers with personalized messaging and customized offers
• Tactical retries — boost recovery rates with strategically scheduled payment retries 
• 1:1 personalization — get a custom churn reduction strategy developed by Retain’s retention specialists based on data insights 

Starting price: Based on the recovered revenue

3. ChurnBuster

Just like Retain, ChurnBuster is, in essence, a payment recovery tool that helps prevent churn by ensuring that the customers’ subscription payments all go through. 

The platform’s goal is to help subscription-based eCommerce companies boost their customer lifetime value (LTV) by reducing payment failure and allowing for the recovered revenue to be channeled into growth channels.

Best features: 

• Enhanced payment retries — maximize payment recovery with strategically timed payment retries 
• Custom email campaigns — enhance recovery with custom emails, A/B testing, customer segmentation, and more 
• Detailed analytics — gain insights into your customer cohorts, stock-keeping units (SKUs), A/B testing results, and more

Starting price: $99/month at up to $50,000 monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

4. Upzelo

Upzelo is a customer retention platform that caters to SaaS, e-commerce, subscription box, membership, and digital content brands alike with a set of churn prevention and analytics tools. 

Upzelo’s churn prevention toolkit includes capabilities such as customer surveys, audience segmentation, cancellation flow analysis, and more — all aimed to help companies boost their customer retention. 

Best features: 

• Churn analytics — get detailed insights into your customer churn metrics, including MRR churn, average revenue churn (ARC), and revenue churn rate
• Customer surveys — automatically survey all canceling customers with dynamic content and results in visualization to get a better understanding of your churn flows
• Retention offers — create individualized offers for your customer to help improve retention

Starting price: €49/month + free version available 

5. Brightback

Brightback is a cancel experience management tool that helps SaaS, eCommerce, and digital subscription companies prevent customer churn by optimizing their cancel flows. 

With Brightback, you can personalize and automate the cancellation experience for each customer with special offers that can help prevent them from churning. 

Best features: 

• Offer library — build a library of tailored offers that will help improve your customer retention, including discounts, plan pauses, and plan changes
• Automated customer profiling — identify the high-value customers to focus your retention efforts on
• Deflection funnel — gain insights into your cancel process and optimize it for customer retention

Starting price: $250 for the first 50 monthly sessions on the platform 

6. Gainsight

One of the largest companies in the customer success industry, Gainsight offers a comprehensive customer success management platform that is aimed at large businesses. 

It is best suited for companies who are looking to scale their growth through optimizing their customer success and product experience management practices — including churn prevention. 

Best features: 

• Customer health scorecards — monitor your customer health based on product usage data, CRM data, and more
• Customer journey orchestration — deliver and scale customer engagement with automated, personalized experiences
• Expansion planning — identify growth opportunities with rich customer data and workflow automation capabilities 

Starting price: On request

Best customer service practices to reduce churn

Now that you’ve equipped yourself with the right churn prevention software for your needs, you can put it to work and start boosting your customer retention along with your revenue. 

Now, that’s easier said than done. Of course, you need the right tools to combat churn — but you also need to have tangible churn rate goals and a set of best practices to act upon. 

As we mentioned above, customer churn might not be entirely preventable. As a result, achieving a 0% customer churn rate is not exactly a realistic goal. Still, this is the number you should be aiming for if you want to maximize your revenue and growth opportunities. 

With that in mind, here are a few best practices you should follow when developing your customer churn prevention strategy with the help of your chosen software.

Ask the customer actively, what issues they are facing

68% of customers leave because they think the company doesn’t value them so contacting them personally shows them that you care. Avoid impersonal methods such as surveys and make sure to reach out over direct phone calls, email, live chat or social media. 

This makes the customer feel that they are valued and that the support team is dedicated to solving their issues. These kinds of practices go a long way towards customer retention and growth in loyalty.  

Engage with Customers

Keep adding value to your customers. Keep them intrigued. This is a great way of ensuring customer retention.

Consistently share value adding content about your products key functionalities. Offer new deals, special offers, and keep the customer posted about software updates. Email marketing is one of the most effective retention tools for B2B businesses. 

Provide better customer service

The most obvious method to ensure healthy customer retention and reduce churn is to simply provide exemplary customer service. Train your staff well, teach them the virtues of patience when it comes to customer service.

Encourage them to be empathetic but at the same time ensure they develop the expertise and competency to resolve customer issues in the quickest and most efficient manner. Poor customer service can contribute to 70% customer churn. 

ThriveDesk for providing better customer support

ThriveDesk is one of the best help desk software that allows you to manage your customer interactions in one place. You can improve your customer experience, reduce churn, and increase conversions with the best customer service solutions. 

With ThriveDesk live chat software, customers don’t have to wait for days for an answer from the company’s customer service department. Instead, they can get instant answers from the agents who are available at all times of the day. With a centralized knowledge base for all your customer service needs, ThriveDesk handles churn efficiently, resolving customers’ issues.

It also lets you be proactive about your customers’ needs and take care of them before they become problems.

You can have your customer service representatives on hand 24/7, so customers will never feel abandoned or ignored. This reduces the churn rate as customers are satisfied with their experience and do not feel like they are being ignored by the company.

Best features:

ThriveDesk features a help desk module with an intuitive interface that will make managing your customers’ requests more straightforward. It also has a wide range of integrations to streamline the process of better workflow.

• Live chat — used to provide instant help and support to customers. It is an effective way of engaging with customers and providing them with the necessary information.
• Knowledge base —  database of information that contains articles, tutorials, FAQs, and other information that can be used to solve problems or answer questions.
• Advanced reporting —  providing a personalized experience for every company with their own dashboard where they can see data about their customers’ conversations in real time.

Starting price: $6.67/month + free version available 

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Pay attention to complaints

When handling customer complaints ensure extreme diligence. Teach your team to be mindful of complaints. They must always get to the root cause of the issue and try to make sure that it never happens again. This means that your service and technical teams should have clear lines of communication. This helps tagging issues to prevent future complaints. 

1 negative experience can make 32% of customers drop your service. On the other hand, a positive experience can massively impact a customer’s perception of your company. They may even go as far as to advocate for your product and service and provide recommendations to the people around them. 

Make sure your team is properly trained to deal with cancellations

Make sure that your team consists of individuals with excellent communication and interpersonal skills. They must be trained properly to deal with disgruntled customers. Cancellation prevention can massively improve your conversion and retention rates. If a company provides good customer service, 78% of customers are willing to do business even after a mistake.  

Sometimes all it takes is an empathetic individual who can understand the customers point of view and connect with them on a personal level. Treating your customers respectfully can go a long way when it comes to ensuring retention and reducing churn.

Personalize your approach to each customer

A personalized digital experience with a brand can be a deal breaker for 75% of customers online. And that’s under normal circumstances. When it comes to customers on the verge of churning, this figure may be even higher. What this means is that you should try to personalize your approach to each customer as carefully as possible. 

Showing a customer that you are invested in keeping them a happy client can give you just the push you need to succeed in your retention efforts. 

Wrapping Up

Customer churn can seriously hinder the growth opportunities of your business. This is why it is very important that you proactively manage it and work to prevent it. 

Even though it may not be possible to completely prevent your customers from churning, there are still things you can do to minimize your churn rate. The first is to invest in churn prevention software. 

Fortunately, there are many solutions available on the market at different price points, each with its own unique features and benefits. In this article, we have highlighted some of the best! So, take your pick and get down to boosting that retention rate!