Put simply, the churn rate of your business is how many customers you are losing.

More specifically, it’s how many you lose over a certain period of time. It can be calculated as follows:

(Customers at the start of a given time period – Customers left at the end) / Customers at the start.

Your churn rate is a good measure of the health of your business. If it’s low, it’s likely that you have a quality product and consumer satisfaction is booming. If it’s high, it could be a good idea to start looking at what’s going wrong. Aside from the fact that less customers means less profit in general, keeping your churn rate low is in your interest, as acquiring a new customer can be five times as expensive than retaining an existing one.

There are a number of ways you can monitor and reduce churn rate across your business, but live chat specifically has some tricks up its sleeve:

Post Chat Questionnaires

Creating surveys is a great way to get information straight from the horse’s mouth. Instead of trying to find out where you are going wrong (and right) with educated guesswork you can simply listen to customers’ feedback. There are a number of questions you can ask but one of the best places to start is asking them to rate the level of service received.

Chat History

The great thing about live chat is that all conversations can be saved, so you can go back and look through them at your leisure. You can listen to customers feedback, but sometimes you simply won’t know why a customer left you. Previous conversations can help you to get your Sherlock on. What are your customers complaints? Were they asking for a price match or comparing you to competitors? Was there a particular issue in a month that your churn rate was low? Look for clues and try to join the dots.

Monitor Your Metrics

Continually analyze your live support software’s metrics to try to find where the problem areas are. If your churn rate is high your staff may not be performing as well as they could. One of the reasons people prefer live chat is because it is quick. In fact, 79% of customers prefer it because of its immediacy. If your response time isn’t up to scratch, you may want to consider some more staff training or growing your team. Take a look at your FCR — or first contact resolution — is your team solving as many issues as they can in the first instance?

Churn Down for What?

Live support has a number of tricks up its sleeve for helping you to reduce churn and increase the number of dedicated customers that can’t get enough of what you do. Any live support software worth its salt will have the tools you need to make this happen. Slaask offers a range of metrics, post-chat questionnaires that are simple to create and chat history efficiently organized in one place, so that you can focus on getting consumer satisfaction up and churn rate down.

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