How to reduce customer churn when it's more critical than ever

Customer churn is a major challenge faced by many SaaS companies. On average, SaaS companies lose 3-8% of their customers per month. That’s 32-50% of your customer base per year.

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• Self-service is critical for customer retention
• Customer retention strategies MUST include video
• Good SaaS onboarding includes video
• Videate keeps how-to videos up-to-date 

It's always important to focus on holding onto your existing customers. For one, it incentivizes companies to put out good products and good customer service. And, of course, it's also way cheaper to maintain existing customers than to acquire new ones. Like, 5-25x cheaper than acquisition.

And this concept is even more apropos during economic downturns. It's harder to get new customers, and it hurts more to lose existing ones.

How can SaaS customer success teams ensure customer retention? By keeping your users engaged.

"High user engagement usually means that the user is actively receiving value from your tool. They are also highly likely to recommend your product to others, upgrade to a higher price plan, and overall help in boosting your growth." (Userlist)

Most new customers don’t quit on a SaaS product because it is bad, or because it doesn’t deliver the service it was promised to do. A lot of times they leave because there was a pain point in the onboarding process.

In other words, a major reason why customers churn is that they're unable to fully utilize their investment quickly enough for it to be worth the time, effort, and budget. 

Self-service is critical for customer retention

How many of your customer support tickets end up being simple issues?

A 2017 Harvard Business Review study revealed that 81% of customers attempt to fix things themselves before hitting up a live customer service representative.

Most people don't want to pick up a phone or shoot off an email or jump into a help chat. They just want to fix the thing or understand the thing they need and move on with the rest of their work. So give them the info they need when they need it.

91% of customers said they'd use a knowledge base if it a A) was available and B) had information tailored to their needs. If you want to keep your customers happy and engaged, then provide a robust library of content covering any and all features of any and all of your products.

Bonus: relevant self-service content frees your Customer Support team from an endless, time-eating backlog of "have you tried turning it off and on again"-type issues and enables them to focus on bigger challenges.

Customer retention strategies MUST include video

So you need a knowledge base. But what goes into it? Well, considering 90% of SaaS customers want video, and 65% say video is their favorite way of learning how to use a product or service, it's not going to be enough to just type up your technical documentation and call it a day.

A full library of up-to-date how-to videos is imperative in reducing customer churn.

First, because the people have spoken and they said they want video. And second, because video is just easier. Maybe not to make (unless you use Videate), but certainly to consume.

Some benefits of video for SaaS companies:

• Video is easy for the viewer to consume
• Short videos for features and updates are perfect for customer onboarding and continued education
• Users would rather watch a video addressing common questions or troubleshooting scenarios than contact customer support
• Not contacting support because they found a video means reduced technical support tickets
• Another bonus: video significantly increases website traffic and generates more 1200% shares than images and text combined

Written instructions can be overwhelming and difficult to follow, especially for non-technical users. How-to videos with simple step-by-step guidance both tell the customer what they need to know and exactly what it will look like as they do it. They can watch how to interact with the software and not feel like they're diving into the unknown.

A library of how-to videos ensures customers can access the information they need when they need it. At their own pace.

How-to videos can also help customers get the most out of their software. Often, customers use only a fraction of the available features. With how-to videos on all features and uses cases of the software, customers will learn about aspects of it they never would've thought to ask for and go deeper in their usage and familiarity with the product without ever having to pick up the phone.

When a user can benefit from the full value of your product, you get higher customer satisfaction and reduce the likelihood of churn.

Good SaaS onboarding includes video

SaaS companies want to set their customers up for success right away. A short collection of onboarding videos can help.

Specific videos can be made to:

• Welcome new customers
• Showcase the basic features
• Explain product layout and design
• Map ways to further customer assistance (poor customer service is a key reason why clients churn, so having a clear way of reaching out to your experts is key). 

Onboarding videos should be short, concise, and nonlinear (in other words, can be viewed in any order).

They should also be up-to-date.

There are very few things more frustrating to a SaaS customer than watching a tutorial of an older version of a product, with completely different layout, design elements and features. 

Videate keeps how-to videos up-to-date 

A full library of up-to-date how-to videos is a critical tool for SaaS companies looking to reduce customer churn. But producing enough video content to provide users with the information they need when they need it is easier said than done. 

Creating videos for every feature of every product in every iteration would be tough but doable if software stayed the same forever. But it doesn't. When you factor in constant software updates, it's impossible to maintain a video library without automation.

Thankfully, Videate can help. 

Videate understands the pain SaaS companies experience when it comes to video production. That's why we made it infinitely faster and easier to produce, maintain, and globalize videos than any other platform on the market.

Stop working harder and work smarter: see for yourself how Videate can help you make a full library of how-to videos in minutes.