Our First Churning Customers
It was bound to happen sooner or later, and since writing my last blog post, it did: We’ve had our first churning customers.
Three customers.
Four paid seats.
€ 59.8 MRR in total.
It sucks! It freaking sucks big time! But it also turned out to be a lesson to learn from.
Churn reasons
One of them wasn’t properly onboarded and never really got started using Herodesk. That’s bad. Like, really bad, when we managed to get them to sign up and upgrade to a paid subscription, but they never got started.
When going through the most recent upgrades to Herodesk Plus, I can see that this also applies to others, making them high-churn-risk customers.
I need to go back and re-visit my onboarding flow. It already has:
- In-app product tour and onboarding / “getting-started” guides
- E-mail flows
- Online onboarding meetings
Maybe it just wasn’t a fit? In any case, more needs to be done here to be sure.
The two others got onboarded but churned for two different reasons:
- A one-man webshop who learned that, for her, it was more difficult to have support mail + SoMe in Herodesk, than to have support + personal mail in Outlook and SoMe directly on the platforms. It wasn’t a match with the ICP. Herodesk isn’t built to handle your personal e-mail. If gathering all support communication across channels in one system that also integrates with your webshop doesn’t provide enough value for you, then it’s not a match between our businesses.
- The other was a company with three users that manages 10-12 different inboxes (brands + languages). They got fully onboarded and started using Herodesk. However, they tested it with 1 or 2 of their inboxes, as they currently use another helpdesk tool. Their feedback was that they thought the other tool was easier to work with and that their dashboard gave them a bitter overview of customer conversations across inboxes.
The last one annoys me. It’s a perfect ICP match. They signed up, were onboarded, and started using the product, but they ultimately chose to stay with their current solution. Ouch...
Learnings from the churned customers
What we are doing right:
- Features – Herodesk has the features that our customers need. More will be added, but we’re not losing sales due to a lack of features right now.
- Pricing—There have been no complaints about the product being too expensive. You might even argue it’s too cheap, but that’s another discussion for another day.
What needs to be improved:
- Onboarding – Better use of data to tailor the onboarding process for each customer.
- User Experience – Keep iterating and improving the user interface and user experience when using Herodesk.
- High Churn Risk Detection – Use the available data to identify high-churn-risk customers and reach out to them to prevent them from churning before it happens (this is super difficult, but if done right, it can avoid some - not all - churn).
—
Although customer churn sucks, it’s one of the best moments to learn.
Currently, I’m manually reaching out to customers who have cancelled their subscriptions. Thanks to our business model, there’s always a delay between subscription cancellation and actual downgrade, as the latter doesn’t happen until the prepaid subscription expires. That gives me a chance to reach out and ask what’s going on.
It’s simple: I’ll email them a prepared template. If they don’t reply, I’ll call them. I’m always asking the same three questions:
- Why did you decide to cancel your subscription?
- What could we have done better?
- Is there anything we can do to change your mind?
Best case scenario? They re-activate their subscription.
Worst case scenario? We learn what went wrong and can use that knowledge to improve.
