5 Ways to Reduce Customer Churn Through Customer Education

B2B customers are hard to acquire. Still, once you cross that hurdle, you are overwhelmed by another challenge — how to reduce customer churn.

Your potential and existing customers need your equal attention. This makes the process overwhelming because most businesses have limited customer support budgets.

In order to manage that, they need a solid customer education strategy that educates their customer base from the very start.

This becomes crucial regardless of the product or service that is being pitched. This is because a well-crafted and implemented customer education plan makes customers feel valued. It also helps with churn reduction.

Moreover, the B2B target customers are bottom-line personalities who are better informed. Hence, convincing them is not easy and takes time. Then, of course, you must provide value to get their attention, but this must be an ongoing process. This alone can help in reducing customer churn.

The most effective way to provide value is through customer education. It elevates customer experience and boosts loyalty. As a consequence, your customer churn reduces.

However, creating a customer education program is often challenging. To make it a seamless process, we have compiled five strategies and tactics about ways to reduce customer churn. These are guardrails to designing a powerful customer education program.

How to Reduce Customer Churn Rate: 5 Proven Methods

Here's how you can reduce customer churn rate and improve retention while dealing with B2B customers:

1. Leverage Data to Segment Customers

If you are stuck with how to decrease churn, go back to the basics. Start by proactively leveraging your existing customer base’s data. You will notice the gaps when you start diving deeper into the behavioral aspect in the customer journey.

This will provide insights into how your customers feel about your products or services.

Are they able to use them effectively?

Has the educational content helped?

Does the onboarding process need more improvement?

So on and so forth.

You can quantify the customer experience based on appropriate KPIs. For instance, customer engagement levels help determine at-risk customers.

These insights provide a starting point to plan short and long-term strategies. Customer data analytics can also be useful in getting the churned customers back. This requires a thorough study of their interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

In this case, you can rely on indicators like abandonment, missed payments, service downgrade, and CSAT scores. You can also count on customer feedback to further analyze where things go wrong.

Finally, break down these customer segments by building customer personas for each of them.

2. Identify their Pain Points

After segmenting and creating customer personas for at-risk and churned customers, it is time to identify the pain points.

Start by identifying the knowledge gap for each customer persona. As no two personas have the same problems, providing a common solution is pointless. Even if the problems are the same do, the way in which different customers deal with it might differ.

Let’s assume you want to create educational content for your latest feature to boost customer retention. So, in this case, you might be dealing with small and large companies in your customer base. While some may subscribe to the under-30 employees plan, others may have picked the 100-plus plan.

In this case, the larger customer could be a Fortune 500 company. On the other hand, the under-30 employees plan could be that of a Solopreneur.

The Solopreneur could be a 25-year-old man or woman. While the larger customer could be a company with a team of seasoned human resource professionals.

Thus, the learning curve will, most likely, differ because the Solopreneur definitely needs more detailed training. Then again, backgrounds and the business sector play a significant role too.

Is it someone from the IT business? Or someone from the retail industry with little understanding of digital monitoring tools? Once you've figured that out, you'll realize how different their concerns are.

Now, go one step further and identify the product or service-related problems they face. Analyze the collected data. You will then be able to detect the pain points to prevent churn in the long term.

3. Fix their Problems Fast

Faster resolutions are crucial for better customer service. It ensures improved customer feedback and higher CSAT scores. Every business model has its own product or service-related issues. The best way to fix them is by creating laser-focused content.

However, if it is something you've already fixed, communicate that educational content effectively. This does not mean creating a lengthy article about the product or service. If you do that, customers might feel overwhelmed. When this happens, the customer experience flatlines and the customers leave.

A better alternative would be to create educational content in video form. Trainn takes this one step further and lets you do that in several international languages. The platform also lets users track engagement for each video. So, analytics like the number of views, engagement, etc., are right there.

4. Plan, Build, and Organize Ongoing Education

Problem-centric content controls the churn rate, but ongoing customer education prevents it. You show that you care by educating customers on how best they can use your product or service. When done correctly, it becomes a powerful customer retention strategy. This is because providing customer education tools and training make your customers look at you not as a vendor but as a partner in their success.

• Define the Learning Objectives

As you have already identified the knowledge gap, start by building on top of that. Figure out what business goals your customers want to achieve. Tell them how they can do it in the shortest time possible. Can your offering help in reducing costs?

Those must be the learning objectives. Since it's a B2B customer education plan, it's all about providing lasting value.

• Plan Effectively

The next step is to build the annual customer education strategy. A good start would be an educational content calendar. So, create one with enough room for quarterly revisions. Include topics that are duly scheduled for special events.

For example, let's assume you are a marketing automation SaaS provider. Here, the goal of your customers is to generate more sales. The best periods are Black Friday and Christmas. Those subscribing to your tool will need more training during those events - preferably a month or so before such sales events.

So, tell them how to optimize campaigns during those periods. As an accounting SaaS provider, you must do this sometime before the financial year ends.

• Develop and Schedule

Once the learning calendar is ready, start by getting the content developed. The medium matters, and it's now well-established that video content outperforms text. Create content in multiple languages if your product or service is trying to connect with a global clientele. Your customers will feel valued and connected if you do that.

In fact, this must be the case even during the customer onboarding process. However, that can be expensive. Trainn solves this concern through text-to-speech AI voiceovers and subtitles in 100+ languages.

Finally, schedule the intimation email to this content on a day when the open rates are going to be high. Alternatively, you can use it as part of the ChatBot script in response to certain keywords.

5. Set Up Educational Support

As you educate your customers, you'll have them coming back with questions. Anticipate these questions well in advance to be well-prepared and save time. Then, create a knowledge base of videos and articles to provide answers.

Alternatively, you can create a chatbot to answer product or service-specific questions. Also, make customer query-based content development an ongoing process.

You can collect the inputs about common customer queries from the support requests. You can even have a quiz at the end of each lesson to collect this data.

Using the two in tandem reduces the number of tickets without frustrating the customer. The bottom line is to make it interactive and provide faster resolutions. This is crucial because businesses now get the top spot based on customer satisfaction.

Final Takeaway

Now that you know strategies to reduce customer churn rate for B2B customers, it is probably easier to plan the roadmap. The customer education strategies given here are general in nature. It is recommended that you tweak them based on your business model. Particularly, the data analysis and segmentation parts because everything else is built on top of it.

Therefore, a robust customer education strategy goes beyond shooting X number of videos and dividing the number by views.

Instead, it is all about useful content that provides value right from the onboarding process. Such content boosts customer loyalty, and the ROI goes beyond customer retention. Developing video content is expensive. Hence, if you are now wondering how to reduce customer churn on a budget, here’s some good news.

At Trainn, we make video content development a seamless and cost-effective process.

In under 5 minutes, you can create multilingual customer education videos and take your customers one step closer to their goals. This is made possible using advanced text-to-speech AI and a powerful editing tool.

You can record the workflows within minutes, add your very own voice, or use the in-built AI voices. All it takes is a script. Put everything together, and you are done!

For more details, get in touch and schedule a demo today.