6 steps to reduce churn for high volume subscription companies

Guy MarionContributorShare on TwitterGuy Marion is CEO/co-founder of Brightback, the first automated customer retention software for subscription businesses.

Your customers don't really want to cancel. At least, not all of them. Between 15 and 30 percent of customers leave for reasons that are within your control. Tapping into these customers at the right momentfor the right reason, and giving them a path to stay is the key to reducing churn for subscription companies.

These six steps outline how to intercept customers who show intent to cancel, and use their feedback to take action, build better experiences and ultimately retain subscribers:

1. Survey every customer at the point of cancel
2. Define a reason-based classification system for churn
3. Connect churn data to a central source of truth
4. Segment customers by actionability
5. Deliver personalized, reason-based offers
6. Test and evolve using saved revenue as your KPI

Step 1. Survey every customer at the point of cancel

The subscription industry has many ways of collecting customer feedback. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and in-product surveys are table stakes for most companies. You need a regular pulse on customer sentiment, but polling customers while they're still customers isn't enough.

Cancellation is a critical moment in the customer lifecycle rivaled only by the moment of purchase, and yet it remains a blind spot for most companies.

When customers cancel, they're sending a message with their wallets-to effectively reduce churn, you need to know why. Surveying customers at the point of cancel is an untapped opportunity because: