Customer Retention Software Cuts Down Client Churn
Customer retention software has become essential for effective SaaS customer success strategies. A winning SaaS business model must prioritize retaining customers, which is far more cost-efficient than acquiring new clients to offset churn. Customer retention software automates best practices for maintaining clients, helping you deliver successful outcomes that inspire subscription renewals and repeat business.
Here’s our guide to today’s best customer retention management software. First, we’ll define what customer retention automation is. Then, we’ll offer some tips for using your customer retention management system to meet your customer success goals for each stage of your client’s lifecycle. Finally, we’ll review five of today’s top customer retention platform tools and what they can do to help you maintain more clients.
What Is Customer Retention Software?
Customer retention software is an app that promotes SaaS subscription renewals and reduces churn rates. The term refers to a function that several different types of software apps may serve. For instance, a customer relationship management (CRM) app may be used to segment customers at risk of churn and reach out to them, serving as a CRM customer retention tool. Other types of apps that may support customer retention include software for dunning management, collecting user feedback, tracking customer loyalty and analyzing client behavior. In general, any software that helps increase subscription renewals and decrease churn may serve as a customer retention tool.
Customer retention software performs tasks that serve to promote subscription renewals and identify customers at risk of churn, such as:
- Ensuring successful onboarding
- Encouraging more significant product usage
- Tracking and improving customer satisfaction before subscription renewal deadlines
- Reminding customers of renewal deadlines
- Identifying customers in the market for upsell offers and referral invitations
A customer retention software tool may perform these tasks independently or through integration with other tools like customer success software.
Aligning Your Customer Retention Goals with Your Customer Success Strategy
Customer retention software can play a crucial role in implementing your customer success strategy. An effective customer success strategy centers around delivering satisfying outcomes to clients at each critical point along their customer journey. Systematically providing successful outcomes during these key interactions increases customer satisfaction, promoting subscription renewals while decreasing churn. Customer retention software can support your success strategy by automating best practices that deliver successful outcomes throughout your customer lifecycle. Here are some specific ways to combine customer success best practices with your customer retention platform to promote outcomes that drive retention during each stage of the customer journey.
Onboarding
The road to retention starts with a successful onboarding experience. Customers who complete onboarding quickly start deriving value from their purchase faster, making them more likely to become active users who renew. On the other hand, customers who experience barriers to onboarding may be slow to adopt product features or may not continue using your product at all, making renewal less likely.
Customer retention software can help you promote subscription renewals by guiding customers through onboarding. For example, you can use automated communication tools, such as emails and webinars, to help ensure that customers have the support they need to familiarize themselves with how to complete onboarding and start using your product. To illustrate, Totango’s Manage Onboarding Projects SuccessBLOC module lets you set up an automatically triggered email sequence you can send out to new customers, including an email inviting them to view a recorded or live onboarding webinar.
Adoption
Clients who are active users are more likely to renew, while inactive users are more likely to churn. You can use customer retention software to promote renewal by encouraging higher adoption rates.
For example, you can use automated monitoring of client accounts to track user adoption rates. Suppose client activity falls below a certain threshold, such as not logging in for 21 days. In that case, this can trigger an email with a message encouraging activity, such as a reminder or an introduction to a useful product feature.
Renewals
As subscription renewal deadlines approach, it’s important to check customer satisfaction levels to make sure they’re high enough that clients will want to renew. This allows you to address any issues inhibiting renewal.
One way to do this is by using automated monitoring of customer satisfaction KPI scores to segment customers based on satisfaction levels. You can then set up automated workflows appropriate to different scoring segments. For example, customers with low satisfaction levels might trigger an alert to your success team to analyze the situation and initiate an intervention well ahead of renewal deadlines.
Another method for high-touch clients is to schedule monthly or quarterly business reviews. This allows you to update stakeholders on their progress, draw attention to the value customers are deriving and strategize how to address any concerns.
Upsells
Monitoring customer adoption and satisfaction levels also allow you to capitalize on opportunities. Highly active customers and satisfied users may be open to renewing and purchasing upgrades or additional upsell products. You can use customer retention software to segment customers and develop automated offers to delight users.
Top Five Customer Retention Software Solutions for Customer Success
The types of customer success strategies suggested above can be implemented through several different types of software solutions. Here are some leading examples from five different categories of software that can help you improve your customer retention.
1. Customer Relationship Management: Hubspot
Customer relationship management apps let you track client interactions so that your marketing and sales teams can personalize and optimize engagement with customers. Customer retention in CRM apps can also support customer success management.
Hubspot provides CRM features for use across organizations, including marketing, sales, customer service and operational teams. The app lets you perform tasks like storing contact information, tracking customer interactions, analyzing account status and scheduling appointments.
2. Dunning Management: Profitwell
Dunning is a method of collecting debts customers owe you by setting up automated billing, sending billing reminders, and segregating accounts for different actions based on how overdue they are. Dunning management software helps you automate dunning procedures to increase retention and revenue.
Profitwell integrates with your billing system to help you recover accounts that would otherwise potentially be lost. Analytics tools help you automatically identify reasons why customers didn’t renew and reach out to them with optimized offers inviting them to remain customers. The analysis also enables you to optimize timing for retrying automated credit card payments, reducing unnecessary churn from billing attempt failures.
3. Customer Feedback: Qualroo
Getting customer feedback can help you make adjustments that avoid churn. Feedback software automates soliciting, analyzing and deploying customer input.
Qualaroo allows you to solicit feedback using surveys on your website or app. Analytics tools let you adjust survey questions to website activity, purchase history and other criteria.
4. Customer Loyalty: Open Loyalty
Rewarding customer loyalty helps you motivate renewals. Customer loyalty software automates processes such as tallying rewards points and allocating rewards.
Open Loyalty provides flexible building blocks to create personalized loyalty programs. You can automatically collect data from multiple customer engagement channels to add rewards points and segment customers into rewards categories.
5. Behavioral Analytics: Hotjar
How customers interact with your website can tell you how engaged they are with your product and how inclined they are to renew their subscription. Behavioral analytics software helps you track customer website activity, analyze it and respond accordingly.
Hotjar helps you visualize what visitors do on your website by displaying it in visual heatmaps, intuitively summarizing behavior patterns. You can track exactly what customers do on your site during each stage of their visit from entrance to exit. You can correlate this data with data on customer churn and spending to leverage it for higher retention and revenue.
Use Customer Retention Software to Keep More Clients
Customer retention software apps help you increase subscription renewals and decrease churn. CRM tools, dunning management software, customer feedback, loyalty apps and behavior analytics software can aid customer retention. These tools can sync with your customer success software to deliver outcomes that promote retention throughout each stage of your customer’s journey.
Totango supports your customer success strategy with KPIs and automated workflows, which can work by seamlessly integrating with the tools above to deliver successful outcomes to your clients. Start for free to see how customer success automation can help you put your client retention strategy into action.
