How CX (Customer Experience) Can Combat Customer Churn

When prospective customers browse through a retailer’s store or site, everything they look at or interact with makes up their overall customer experience (CX). Customer experience affects whether a customer will choose to buy a product from the company, but also whether they return to the store for more. As a retailer, your goal is to improve overall sales but also to combat customer churn. These tips can help you identify potential issues with your processes and create solutions to improve your customer experience.

How Does CX Affect Customer Churn?

Customer churn describes the loss of a customer over time, and CX plays a big part. Customer churn happens for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Financial concerns, including a lack of funds
• Changing customer priorities
• Trouble understanding how to complete a purchase
• Bad customer experiences, from poor customer service to difficulty finding the location

A failure to accept popular payment methods may lead customers to search for competitors. Difficulty finding additional items in the store wastes time that customers could be spending doing other things. While some churn is expected in any business, return clients are a desirable asset. In most cases, retailers can minimize churn by optimizing the customer experience.

Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience

Streamline customer touchpoints

Every place a customer interacts with your brand is a touchpoint, which you should streamline for a better experience. Customers learn more about your company by visiting your site, going to a brick-and-mortar store and spending time on your social media accounts. These experiences should be consistent, updated and brand-focused, emphasizing your business’s mission and the value to customers.

Decrease response times

Customers often will not spend time waiting for answers to questions, when they could easily go to a competitor. Decreasing your response times solves problems and shows that your business provides personalized service. Adding chatbots and other services help customers get quick answers to common questions, ensuring that they can continue to progress through the sales channel.

Optimize billing processes

Payment and invoicing systems make up the final steps of the purchasing process for many customers, highlighting the importance of success. Trouble navigating the process often creates a failure point for customers. An integrated billing system can provide a seamless purchasing experience for customers with integrated accounting and other services to simplify your financial responsibilities.

Incentivize loyalty

Customers reward retailers they like with additional business, and you can return the favor. Loyalty programs give customers incentives for buying at certain times or making regular purchases. Make sure that the terms are easy to understand and rewards easy to apply to purchases, so that the loyalty program becomes a fun game for customers to enjoy as part of the experience.

Collect feedback

Customers usually will not tell a retailer outright about a bad customer experience, which makes feedback a crucial post-sales tool. Customer satisfaction surveys help you to understand what you did well and how you can improve, especially if you are struggling to manage customer churn. Be sure to ask specific questions about the experience and identify particular aspects of the purchase process to get the most detailed feedback. 

Customer churn is a fact of life for retailers, but you may want to try to minimize it as much as possible. Improving your customer experience can decrease the churn that happens without your knowledge, by simplifying your process for getting from start to finish. By streamlining every stage of the purchasing process for your customers and ensuring that you provide value to your target demographic, you can improve your rate of return customers.

Contributed by Matt Ream is the Director of Product Marketing at BillingPlatform. With extensive experience in product marketing, particularly for B2B SaaS companies, Ream has a proven track record of establishing robust marketing foundations and positioning products as industry leaders.