The Cost of B2B Customer Churn and How to Reduce It
For B2B sellers, one-off sales aren’t enough to grow a consistent book of business. While closing an initial sale is excellent on its own, utilizing that sale as an opportunity to convert one-time buyers into long-term, loyal clients are the key to a thriving B2B business. As a result, B2B customer churn is something every business owner should consider reducing.
Some B2B businesses are subscription-based, so retention is even more important in addition to upsell and cross-selling. Expanding into an already engaged customer base and building true advocates out of them who essentially sell your products and services for you with word-of-mouth is critical. Churn will erode your revenue base, and you might find yourself making new sales to survive because of the leaks in your customer base. Revenue is draining faster than you can refill it.
This begs the question: How does one reduce customer churn most effectively? There are a few ways to do so, and most of them are focused on the customer experience post-purchase. The sales process is important for initial conversion, but quality customer service management after the sale goes much further in retaining clients.
To help businesses get on the right path, we are going to cover a few things:
- What is the cost of B2B customer churn?
- What is the best way to reduce it?
- How can business owners get started?
Let’s dive in and answer each of these questions.
What is the Cost of B2B Customer Churn?
There are plenty of numbers behind the significant costs associated with failing to retain customers.
78% of buyers say that they would rather purchase from a competitor after a single bad experience.
Customer churn happens quickly, and it only takes one oversight to lose a previously converted client.
Acquiring new clients costs 5-25x more than retaining existing ones.
Failing to retain clients leads to a far more costly and less-efficient sales process trying to convert new leads.
Businesses that focus on customer service and retention bring in 4-8% higher revenues than those that don’t make it a primary goal.
Businesses that don’t focus on customer retention leave significant amounts of money on the table.
About 3 out of 5 buyers say that good customer service is vital for them to feel loyalty toward a brand.
Businesses can lose out on many potential repeat buyers by not properly investing in their customer service management to retain them.
Now that we know why it is vital to invest in reducing B2B customer churn, let’s discuss how.
What is the Best Way to Reduce B2B Customer Churn?
There are many strategies to reduce churn and create lasting business relationships with clients. Generally, the idea is to focus on the customer experience and ensuring that clients are taken care of after they make a purchase.
The most effective ways to do so include the following:
- Proactively reach out to clients to ensure that they are satisfied
- Respond promptly and thoroughly to concerns and questions
- Offer convenient self-service portals for client complaints
- Keep organized records of client data, complaints, and questions to ensure that every rep can provide them a personalized experience
- Use this data to make relevant upsell and cross-sell recommendations to bring clients back into the sales cycle
Implementing all of these changes at once can be pretty tricky. Aspects of the customer service experience like response time, record keeping, and methods of contact can largely depend on the CSM or ITSM platform they use.
As a result, the most effective way to reduce B2B customer churn is to implement a higher-level CSM software platform, elevating the customer experience.
Decrease B2B Customer Churn with Vivantio
While each of the benefits listed in this article work wonders for businesses, they won’t help if managers choose a platform that doesn’t offer all of the necessary features. Vivantio offers a cutting-edge customer service software platform that offers everything listed and more, including:
- Endless integrations to make implementation easy
- Automatic ticket routing to ensure every ticket gets to the proper agent
- Workflow designer tool that allows managers to customize the framework of their CS operations without any technical knowledge required
- White label service portals so businesses can maintain a cohesive brand throughout the service process
- A holistic view of each client to elevate and improve the customer experience
For businesses looking to bring their customer experience into the modern age, Vivantio is a no-brainer option.
