Your product team should always strive to keep customer churn, a.k.a. customer attrition, as low as possible. Lowering your churn rate often comes down to making feature adjustments that increase customer loyalty. That’s where surveys come into play.
If you’ve already integrated Sprig into your tech stack, you might be familiar with in-product Surveys, which are especially powerful in preventing churn. Let’s take a deep dive into how to reduce customer churn through in-product surveys.
Understanding Customer Churn
Customer churn is the number of lost customers divided by total customers in a given time period. Over time, if your churn rate keeps going up, the revenue your product generates will go down. Conversely, the higher your customer retention rate, the more profitable your product will be.
Admittedly, churn is, in some way, just part of how things go — not every customer will stick around. However, actively striving to reduce churn still leads to quite the payoff in most cases. In fact, one oft-cited Bain & Company study found that decreasing customer churn by 5% increases profitability by 25%.
The Power of Surveys in Churn Reduction
The best way to reduce customer churn is to prevent it in the first place. Sprig’s in-product Surveys appear directly within your app and give you first-hand insights into how your users experience your product. They surface issues right where a customer is experiencing a pain point.
You can trigger Sprig Surveys via target groups, an action a user takes, or timing. Use Sprig’s templates or build a custom survey with open-text, multiple-choice, matrix, and rating-scale questions. This way, you capture quantitative and qualitative customer feedback that helps you form purposeful retention strategies.
With both qualitative and quantitative insights, Surveys highlight the root causes of your users’ potential product dissatisfaction and open a window for fixing problems. They’re a real-time tool for effective churn prevention.
Designing Effective Surveys
Any time you can connect with a user is a great time to gather feedback. In-product Surveys exemplify this since they reach your users right where they are — as in, right while using your product. They pinpoint a person’s motivations and enable you to make strategic design and product choices. To get the most out of them, keep three important things in mind.
- Surveys need to be easy to understand, or else you risk drop-off or getting low-quality data.
- Keep your surveys concise — focus your questions on one data point.
- Surveys need to be relevant to the user and their most frequent interactions with your product.
Sprig’s in-product Surveys serve as a continuous part of your users’ product experience. This way, you can aggregate live sentiment data relative to specific UX points. Plus, because surveys integrate so seamlessly into your product, you can expect up to a 30% increase in response rate. That’s way more data you can use to fix problems that are leading to customer churn.
Key Metrics to Track in Your Surveys
Surveys gather vital metrics to help you improve your product experience and user journeys, and when you do that, you decrease customer churn. From the data you gain through Surveys, you can analyze, for example, customer satisfaction, which predicts loyalty and potential churn.
Yes, these are obvious metrics, but in-product Surveys can certainly track more advanced metrics. Tailor your survey prompts to address:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measurement shows how likely a user is to recommend your product to other people.
- Customer Effort Score (CES). This metric analyzes how helpful your product is at helping a customer resolve a pain point. The higher your CES, the more disloyal the customer becomes because of their high-effort interactions with your product. Giving users a low-effort experience can involve taking steps such as reducing page load time and fixing bugs.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). Your CLTV tells you the average period over which people regularly use your product. It’s an ideal metric to track because it’s one of the main indicators that things are going well (or not) when it comes to retention. Based on your findings, you can keep your product intact or make churn-reducing changes.
- Subscription Cancellation. This is a qualitative, not quantitative, metric that reflects user drop-off. Namely, it’s important to learn why a customer decided to cut ties — it’s well-understood that retaining existing customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones. With Sprig, you can send surveys to former customers 24 hours after subscription cancellation to figure out why they were dissatisfied. This could give you an understanding of what to fix about your product experience to minimize churn.
Analyzing Survey Data
So, how do you make all this data work even harder? Correctly analyzing the information is key to capitalizing on what you’ve found. For example, creating dashboards for each user journey aids in identifying patterns.
To take the guesswork out of data analysis, combine Sprig’s in-product surveys with Sprig AI. This GPT-powered feature automatically takes the data garnered from surveys and identifies emerging trends. It also filters survey data by period and user attributes, giving you deeper insights into customer behaviors. This is all information that numbers alone can’t show you.
Understanding customers’ motivations is vital when taking action to address churn. Without advanced insights powering your churn management, you run the risk of keeping the problems with your user experience going for quite some time. Sprig AI tells you exactly what’s wrong so that you can spend less time figuring it out and more time making changes.
Surveys and AI: A Powerful Duo for Reducing Churn
With the right tools in hand, your product team can optimize your user journeys — and your whole product from top to bottom — to reduce churn. In-product Surveys, alongside AI analysis, tell you what’s not working and begin your journey toward meeting your customers’ needs. It’s a powerful combination for pinpoint issues, acting on them, and lowering your churn for years to come.