When customers churn, it seems like it happens out of nowhere. One day, they’re logging in and exploring your product. The next, they’ve disappeared without so much as a goodbye.
But at-risk customers do give warning signs, but many businesses aren’t equipped to detect them. If you measure customer satisfaction solely on direct feedback, you’re not getting the full picture.
With the right data in hand, and the right tools to analyze that data, you can dramatically reduce your churn rate. Our latest guide, From churn to cheerleader: How to make customers fall (and stay) in love with you, explains the process from start to finish.
To get started, here are the three types of customer data that are essential for reducing churn.
Use quantitative, qualitative and visual data to spot subtle clues
Think of your product like a conversation. Every click, pause, and scroll is a sentence. When users hesitate during onboarding, abandon workflows, or repeatedly click something that isn’t a link, they’re telling you something important: “I’m confused,” “I’m frustrated,” or “I don’t see the value here.”
These micro-moments might not appear in an NPS survey or a support ticket but they’re critical clues that can help you win back a wavering customer.
By combining three key types of data—quantitative, qualitative, and visual—you can unlock a deeper understanding of the user journey:
- Quantitative data comes from tracking the measurable actions users take. Warning signs from this type of data include:
- Sessions getting shorter/logins getting less frequent
- New features underutilized
- Lack of growth milestones
- Workflows begun but abandoned
- Qualitative data comes from surveys and requests for feedback. This type of data can tell you:
- Overall user sentiment about your product
- How users feel at specific points in their session
- Where the product may be failing their expectations
- Visual data comes from capturing user behavior in real time. This type of data shows:
- Where users get stuck or drop off
- Confusing or frustrating UI elements
- Exactly where a process or workflow breaks down
With access to these three types of data, you can detect at-risk customers far more easily. Imagine a customer who is struggling with the user interface for a particular process. They click what seems to be the next step button, but it’s just a static image, so nothing happens. They rage click again and again, then finally close the process and log out.
If you were relying on qualitative data alone, you would have no idea that the customer was frustrated. Quantitative data can show that they abandoned the process and didn’t log in for the rest of the day. Visual data reveals the precise point of friction that caused them to give up.
Now you can address the problem head-on, fix the UI issue, and reduce your customer’s churn risk.
Pendo makes collecting evidence easy
Pendo’s Software Experience Management (SXM) platform gives a complete picture of your users’ activity in the software you build, buy, and use.
Pendo Analytics tracks quantitative data and analyzes it with AI to surface insights.
Pendo Listen makes it easy to deploy polls, surveys, and feedback requests. You can place these elements right in the software your users are logged into, next to the very features and processes you’re soliciting feedback on.
Pendo Session Replay captures visual data on user sessions, then uses AI to present the most relevant highlights.
Then, you can close the loop with Pendo In-app Guides and Embedded Guides to direct users to the correct actions.
With these tools on the Pendo platform, your product and success teams have the insights they need to:
- Proactively address frustrations before they lead to churn
- Guide product development with real customer behavior
- Spot opportunities for feature education and upsell
Want the Whole Playbook?
Understanding customer experience is just the first step in a larger strategy to reduce churn and build lasting loyalty. You can get the full step-by-step approach in our latest guide, From churn to cheerleader.
You’ll learn how to:
- Fix friction in your product experience
- Improve onboarding to deliver value faster
- Empower users with self-serve support
- Predict and respond to warning signs before churn happens
Get your copy here: From churn to cheerleader: How to make customers fall (and stay) in love with you.
