How to Quickly Reduce Churn with Just 1 Metric

 As a Customer Service Manager, one of your biggest responsibilities is to keep the churn rate low. Your churn rate is the percentage of customers which stop subscribing to your services, and even a 1% change in churn can result in the growth or decline of your business.

You may have a whole dashboard tracking customer service KPIs, but if you’re not seeing any noticeable change in churn then you may be missing this one key metric:

How Responsiveness and Churn are Connected

Responsiveness is the single most important attribute of any service organization and it especially holds true for IT Service Providers given the criticality of an end user’s network. Understanding how long it takes your team to respond to client issues is the most important metric your team should be monitoring.  

Did you know:

• Failure to resolve an issue quickly is one of the top 2 reasons for a customer loss.
• 41% of customers expect a response within 6 hours, and 24 hours is often considered the maximum acceptable response time.
  
  

The above facts, from Help Scout, show just how closely responsiveness and churn are linked together. Cutting down on the time it takes for your team to respond will directly reduce churn.

How to Monitor and Improve Responsiveness

As the saying goes: “what we measure, we improve”. You can’t begin to improve your responsiveness without doing the following first:

1. Begin collecting data on your response times and verify this data for accuracy.
2. Establish a baseline for your responsiveness so you know where you currently stand.
3. Organize the data and display it in a way that is easily digested and holds you and your team accountable.
   
   

At BrightGauge we monitor response time rigorously and if it is ever out of line we immediately huddle up to figure out what happened and what we can do to fix it.  For those of you using ConnectWise, you can monitor these key metrics…

Tracking the average time to acknowledgment helps you to monitor your response time for any given day, allowing you to quickly see if things are getting off track. A good way to “wow” your customers is to keep this number under an hour at all times.

Tracking the average time to response over 7 trailing days will give you a better indication of the recent trend in volume that may not be visible if you are only looking at the metric for a given day.

Taking Things a Step Further with Client Reporting

Sharing average time to acknowledgement with your clients via our client reporting feature allows you to share the great response time you are providing them. This helps to reinforce the fact that you provide quick service and will help to further reduce churn.

Even with a spike in response time as shown above, it’s still good practice to share this with your clients. The key to building trust is being fully transparent, and by building trust you’ll further lower your churn rate.

To recap:

1. Collect and verify your data
2. Establish a baseline for responsiveness
3. Visualize your data
4. Share your data with client reporting

Accomplish these 4 steps and you’ll have an increase in responsiveness and as a result, a decrease in churn.

Ready to learn more about how to exceed your customers’ expectations through account management? Check out How Investing in Customer Success Drove our MSP Growth: