I don’t own a SaaS company myself, but I am a consultant for many SaaS companies. What I’ve seen work best for my clients when it comes to churn is to first look at how they’re doing from a Customer Success perspective.
- Are they attracting customers who have the potential for success with their product?
- Does their onboarding process get their new customers closer to reaching their ideal outcomes (and does the SaaS business understand what their customers’ ideal outcomes are – because that’s not a given).
- Has the onboarding process been optimized to help new customers bridge success gaps, celebrate milestones, and trigger red flags for customer success (or customer service) if the new customer runs into trouble?
These first three steps are vital to setting up customers for success.
From there, I recommend not starting from a place of “Why are customers churning?” but rather “Why are my best customers staying?”
Focus on doubling down on what you’re doing well. You can’t afford to divert resources from what people love about your product and company so you can try to plug the holes in your bucket.
Finally, you can look at which customers are leaving (and check whether or not they’re your ideal customers – maybe they should leave), and why they’re leaving.
Then organize the Whys by what you can fix fastest, with the least amount of resources, for the biggest impact, and tackle them one by one.
I also recommend creating a community for your SaaS, whether it’s on Slack (BubbleIQ reported ZERO churn among the customers in their Slack community), Facebook, or it’s a DIY-community that you’ve built, that way you can get super close to your customers.
I originally answered this question on Quora.
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