ChurnZero founders You Mon Tsang and Mark Heys are driven by an over-arching question: how can businesses reduce the dreaded customer attrition or churn rate (the percentage of service subscribers that discontinue their business with a given time period).
Of course, this is the same question that causes SaaS companies to lose sleep and is a question that inevitably leads to more questions and, of course, more problems. What is going on with our customers? How can we understand their thinking and tendencies better? And how do we make sense of all the confusing data and contradictory studies that claim to solve the churn riddle once and for all?
Tsang and Heys knew for sure that churn rate is tied to customer health scoring, which allows a company to predict with more accuracy how its relationship with a given customer might change in the future. Knowing what every customer needs, wants, and expects from a product or service is critical to ensuring that your company meets and exceeds these desired outcomes. The healthier the client, the lower the churn, and the more likely your business is to catalyze customer loyalty and even customer advocacy (the holy grail of service design).
They also knew that while customer health is often a central topic of conversation within many departments, it is also likely to slip through the organization cracks and never be addressed in a thorough and persistent way. The one main reason for this obvious disconnect, they concluded, was that there was no single tool available that could collect and analyze customer health data in a way that could impact the churn rate positively. The data was out there, they believed. But it was scattered across too many platforms running in too many departments to be of real value. By the time this data was gathered and assessed, the customer had, in all likelihood, already ended their relationship with the company.
But churn rate is not a universal metric. What might be considered a reasonable churn rate in one industry sector might be regarded as abysmal in another. And while some companies might measure and report monthly user churn, others rely heavily on annual revenue churn.
So, armed with an over-abundance of data and with decades of software entrepreneurship between them, the two founded ChurnZero in 2015 with one mission: to help businesses reduce their churn rates by building a real-time platform to allow businesses to:
-Better understand how their customers use their product
-Assess customer health and their likelihood to renew without unnecessary lag time
-Gives businesses the means to personalize the customer experience through timely and relevant touchpoints.
ChurnZero’s proactive, real-time features provide any business with data-driven but easily understandable information about customer health, behavior, and decision making. Customer segmentation allows for an even more granular understanding of customer health based on such variables as firmographics, lifecycle status, product usage, and critical behavioral data. Reporting comes in the form of easy-to-read summaries that provide a full 360-degree view of your customer base so that you never get lost in the trees while trying to navigate your way to the ultimate goal of lowering your churn rate.
But Tsang and Heys built ChurnZero to move beyond providing a real-time understanding of customer behavior. They wanted to present their clients the advantage of optimizing customer experience through real-time actions driven by real-time data. They knew that seeing the data in real-time is a decisive first step but knowing what to do with that data is the ultimate edge in service design and customer retention.
The result of this belief is a robust cluster of innovative features that elevate customer experience to the next level. These include:
-Real-time alerts to let you know immediately when a significant event like usage drop happens
-Integrated surveys that let you get insights on Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score® (NPS), and Customer Effort Score (CES)
-Automated Playbooks that delivers the impact of personalization using a data-driven playbook that is consistent, efficient, and measurable
-WalkThroughs and Customer Journey features that lead customers to their desired outcomes at each point in their lifecycle.
ChurnZero also offers businesses to customize their reporting dashboard using widgets to integrate data from account and contact attributes, segment results, and account metrics. Additionally, their focus on onboarding keeps all the moving pieces aligned so that every customer is supported with the technical implementation, configuration, and training necessary to ensure their onboarding journey is as seamless as possible. And native integrations are made easy with a full catalog of powerful SaaS tools, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and many others.
ChurnZero’s success has been driven by one insight: the churn challenge is front and center in every industry sector. Studies place the cost of avoidable customer churn just within the U.S. at over $136 billion annually, almost equal to the annual GDP of Washington, D.C. And the need to fight churn only increases every year as competition escalates and global economies shift and rebalance.
Starting from ChurnZero’s first customer in 2016, they now boast over 400 clients and an annual three-fold increase in revenues. In 2019, the company raised $7 million in a Series A funding round led by Baird Capital. Such rapid and well-deserved growth did not go unnoticed. SaaS Mag ranked ChurnZero 31st on their SaaS 1000, the definitive ranking of the world’s fastest-growing SaaS companies. Earlier this year, G2 also ranked ChurnZero 11th on its Top 100 Fastest-Growing Products list. And with continued strong growth through 2020, the future looks brighter still. Fighting churn will never prove an easy battle, but ChurnZero is a powerful and effective tool that clearly tips the scale in a business’s favor.
