Home / Services / Customer Retention & Churn / Lost Customer (Churn) & Win-back Research

Lower Customer Churn With Lost Customer Research

The customer churn is a common measure of lost customers. The telecommunications industry started gauging its customer churn rate long ago, which has since been adopted by many service industries. Specifically, the term refers to the percentage derived by dividing deactivated customers by total customers. A typical churn rate for larger service companies falls in the low single digits, and a two percent change in churn rate can realistically translate into six months of additional service per customer. So measuring churn rate and the factors that lead to customer churn can be critical to the health of a company. If you are like most companies, you probably know what your churn rate is, but do you know which key factors are affecting customer churn and to what degree?

With well over a decade of experience in creating and revising large-scale marketing research survey programs for customer churn, Polaris can definitely help.

Are You Ready To Lower Your Churn Rate?

Utilizing survey research, Polaris specializes in helping companies measure and understand the factors that affect customer churn so that they can take actions to achieve a lower churn rate. There are many types of surveys to help you better understand your customers throughout their lifecycle. But lost customer research is the best approach for decreasing your churn rate, because former customers can tell your how your company is currently performing on the key drivers of customer churn. By conducting customer churn research, you can gather key information such as when and why your customers left your company, what (if any) competitor they selected and why.

Polaris conducts more than 30,000 lost customer surveys annually and specializes in working closely with companies to gather the kind of quality intelligence that can be used to create vulnerable customer profiles. These profiles then can be used to flag vulnerable existing customers in your database (by service plan type, length of service, products in service, geography, demographics, etc.) so you put into place proactive measures to prevent them from going to the competition.

Conducting lost customer research is challenging because lost customers often don’t want to talk to a company they no longer do business with. They often wonder, what’s in it for them? One of the most successful methods for reaching out to customers that have chosen to leave is through a telephone interview. This technique allows for a back-and-forth dialogue. Passive methodologies (e.g., mail or online) contain a higher risk of customer drop-off, whereas a live interviewer can encourage the customer to continue the interview and then tailor the conversation based on the customer’s reaction. It is also important to keep the interview short. Typically, an interviewer that keeps the conversation short and to the point will experience a higher response rate with lost customers.

Contact us to learn more about lost customer/churn research.