507: How to Stop Your Customers From Churning During COVID-19?
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Marketing
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Proactive outreach: Contact customers before they cancel to offer cost-saving alternatives like plan downgrades, data deletion options, contract discounts, or payment delays of fifteen to thirty days to prevent immediate cancellations and maintain relationships.
- ✓Pause versus cancel: Offer customers the ability to pause service instead of canceling outright, preserving their data, customizations, and user setups so they can resume easily without re-entering the market to evaluate competitors.
- ✓Customer communication: Reach out to churning customers through calls and emails to understand their decision-making process, sentiment changes, and priorities, which informs product roadmap, marketing strategy, and retention efforts across the organization.
- ✓Skip payment option: Send targeted emails allowing financially struggling customers to skip their next payment by clicking a button, giving them one free month to gather more information before making a cancellation decision.
What It Covers
Steli Efti and Hasan Shah discuss strategies to reduce customer churn during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing proactive communication, flexible payment options, and maintaining customer intimacy during crisis periods.
Key Questions Answered
- •Proactive outreach: Contact customers before they cancel to offer cost-saving alternatives like plan downgrades, data deletion options, contract discounts, or payment delays of fifteen to thirty days to prevent immediate cancellations and maintain relationships.
- •Pause versus cancel: Offer customers the ability to pause service instead of canceling outright, preserving their data, customizations, and user setups so they can resume easily without re-entering the market to evaluate competitors.
- •Customer communication: Reach out to churning customers through calls and emails to understand their decision-making process, sentiment changes, and priorities, which informs product roadmap, marketing strategy, and retention efforts across the organization.
- •Skip payment option: Send targeted emails allowing financially struggling customers to skip their next payment by clicking a button, giving them one free month to gather more information before making a cancellation decision.
Notable Moment
Multiple customers reported that Close was the only software company among ten cancellations that actually called them, offered solutions, and had meaningful conversations, while competitors remained silent and passive during the crisis.
Episode Transcript
Hey, everybody. This is Steli Efti. And this is Heaton Shah. And today, on the startup chat, we're gonna talk about what to do to stop your customers from churning during this pandemic. Think we like talking about more than just sales and marketing. We just wanna bullshit and chat about business and life. And hopefully, while we're doing that, provide a lot of value to people. The world's best business podcast. Oh. Shit. Oh, shit. We did it. For people trying to get shit and done. Done. Yeah. We don't wanna give you feedback that's bullshit. We want you to do your best. That we're dealing with right now, the COVID nineteen pandemic, coronavirus, whatever people are calling it today. And in this case, I really wanna hear from you, Steli, because I think you've thought about this a lot more than I have. Yeah. And so, yeah, how do we stop churn? How do we stop churn? Well, I think a couple of things. Number one, we might have to accept that some amount of churn is unstoppable. Right? So I think It's also a unfair question. Yeah. Yeah. Stopping churn is difficult in the first place. It's just without a pandemic. It's Yeah. Without a pandemic. So so so that's why I'm like I'm like, you know, you know, like, hey, Steli. I'm gonna ask you. Like, what do you think? Yeah. Yeah. I think a couple of things, though. Even during a I think you should always be working on improving your attention. You should always be working hard to earn your customer's business and to slow down churn or stop it or improve on it. But especially during a pandemic, I think that companies, because of this intense environment, might make some mistakes. So first, I'll tell you the things I think you shouldn't be doing. What you shouldn't be doing, in my opinion at least, is stop communicating because you think if I would either call or email or in any other way contact somebody that wants to cancel right now, cancel my service or my product, I will just make them more angry or it's unreasonable to try to communicate or change their mind right now because this is such a crisis that if I reach out and talk to them, this is such unethical behavior that what I'll do is I will just not get in touch with anybody. Right? I'm just gonna let them leave in peace, basically. I I do understand the the niceness from which this thought maybe arises, but I do think it's misguided. The the second thing you shouldn't be doing is you shouldn't make up a story that gives you permission to be lazy around this, which means don't even if you think it might be reasonable to reach out to them, you might sell yourself on the story, and I see this with many companies that think, well, there's nothing I can do here. It's …
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“Multiple customers reported that Close was the only software company among ten cancellations that actually called them, offered solutions, and had meaningful conversations, while competitors remained silent and passive during the crisis.”
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