The Silent Churn: Why Your Business is Losing Customers

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash  

Have you noticed a decline in customers? Have your growth trends plummeted without any indication of unhappy customers? Your company might be experiencing what is called the silent churn, or the silent killer. So how can you combat silent churn? Well, the first step is understanding what churn is and how to recognize signs of silent churn. Churn is the process in which customers alter their usage patterns in order to switch to a different service. In this process that customer can either partially or completely disconnect from the service. Churn can happen in two ways:

1. The first type of churn is the very obvious and exceedingly loud churn, which may manifest as irate clients who issue ultimatums, post negative reviews, and badger your support team. Then you have the silent churn, which is much more dangerous–here’s why.
2. When you think of unhappy customers, we generally tend to picture demands for refunds, heated conversations, and other confrontational scenarios. What makes silent churn a killer is the absence of these signs. These customers simply opt out of their subscription and disappear without any indication of their dissatisfaction. They’re unresponsive to messages and calls. If you don’t know the issue at hand, how can you resolve it? So how do we find the source of the problem? Well, you have to follow a trail of scattered breadcrumbs.

It is crucial to understand that most customers want quick and responsive customer support teams. A lack of immediate response from support teams can cause users to churn instantly. To combat the silent churn, management teams need to find a way to collect data on user behavior while adhering to data compliance agreements. This can be done through establishing data warehouses to store and analyze customer trends. What specific customer trends should you be monitoring?

The most common and valuable source of data you should be looking at is customer feedback. In the case of restaurants, for example, the most important feedback data they can get comes from customer reviews online on platforms like Yelp and Doordash. Online reviews tend to highlight key aspects such as food quality, cleanliness, and overall dining experience. Most consumers rely on reviews of products and services as a step in their decision-making process when purchasing something. Therefore, your reviews often reflect the gaps you need to fill to achieve customer satisfaction.

Irrespective of online reviews it is important to offer opportunities for customer feedback on a regular basis. This typically involves conducting surveys, testimonial and review requests, and ensuring easy access to the support team. These feedback mechanisms actually capture the extremes of what customers feel–satisfaction and dissatisfaction. If you examine the reviews of any company, you’ll see a plethora of five star and one star reviews. It’s very scarce to see two, three, or four star reviews. Likewise, if you ask your customer support teams, they’ll be able to immediately identify who the unhappiest customer is. It is important to take into account customer feedback and implement solutions that will help grow your business further and your credibility. Customers want companies to listen to their feedback but they think it is a hassle to give the feedback they will simply choose to churn silently.

Additionally, here is a broad list of patterns that should be tracked to avoid falling victim to silent churn: Customer interaction history, user engagement metrics, subscription and payment behavior, customer demographics, and customer support response time. Overall, you want to look at all aspects of your services and form a comprehensive understanding of the services you are providing and any challenges that you are facing within all fields of your business.