Going, Going, Gone! Your Customers are Gone!
Customer retention is a top priority for most companies, especially in highly competitive industries, like insurance or travel. I wanted to share a quick example that demonstrates how a company can be completely blind to the events leading to customer churn. In this case we're talking about an insurance company that I've been a loyal customer of for the past 5 years.
One of the websites I use to track my finances saw my recent bi-annual auto insurance charge and proactively let me know that I was spending about 20% more than the industry average. I was very intrigued by this as this was generally the amount I have been paying for the last 5 years (which actually doesn't make sense now that I think about it, but that's another issue). So I started shopping around for a better rate. I used an online tool that compares several companies and in order to get an apples to apples comparisson I logged on to my current provider's website to check my coverage. This act, on its own, should have tripped some internal mechanism at the company. I haven't logged in for a very long time and all I did was check my coverage. That would seem odd, right?
In any case, I got my other quotes and decided to give this company a shot to match the lowest price I was offered. I logged back in to the website and asked to chat with an agent. Once the agent was online, she told me to call an 800 number and speak to an analyst who would work with me to figure out what can be done about my rate. This doesn't make much sense either. Why wouldn't the chat agent help me in the interaction channel of my choice, while I am already engaged? If I wanted to speak to someone I would have picked up the phone, right?
Anyway, I spoke to the analyst who let me know that I was a very valuable customer but there was nothing he could do to lower my rate. I informed him that I was probably going to cancel my policy and go with the other company since there is no penalty for switching insurance providers and I would get a full refund. He wished me luck. Seriously? I guess they can afford to lose customers this easily. He did ask if I would like to complete a phone survey about the service I received, but when he transfered me to that system I was disconnected, from their end.
I once again logged in to check my coverage and then signed up with the other insurance company for an annual savings of about 26%. When I called back to cancel my account it was already too late to try to save the account, but the nice agent tried anyway. She did let me know that I would need to send an a letter or I could email from their website to make the cancellation official. Which I did.
So what happened here? How many interactions did I have with this company in the process of this single transaction of cancelling my contract? Let's count them together:
Web (coverage) - Web (contact us) - Chat - Phone (IVR + Routing + Agent + CRM) - Survey (failed) - Web - Phone (IVR + Routing + Agent + CRM) - Web (contact us) - Email
That's 15 distinct interactions! How many other customers have had similar interactions? If you were working at this company, would you be able to put all these interactions together and know that this customer was going down the path to churn? Probably not. Well, not unless you were using a ClickFox solution.
Without using ClickFox you would need to know that there is a churn issue in the first place. You would then need to ask your team of analysts the right questions and have them find the root cause of the problem. But ClickFox Pulse will actually show you that there is an increase in churn automatically. And when you click on the root cause button, the software will go out and look for all the top reasons and paths that are leading customers to higher churn rates. You can then apply these findings to existing customers who have not yet cancelled their accounts and predict who is going down the same path. This will make you proactive rather than reacting to problems after the fact. All this without having to build cross-channel models from scratch to tie together disparate data sources, without updating the models every time a data structure changes, without writing complex query scripts and without spending hours upon hours waiting for answers.
Click on the banner below to see how ClickFox Pulse can help you get to the root cause of your business issues:
