Customer Churn

How to reduce customer churn rate

By
Joel Passen
November 8, 2022
5 min read

In any business, customer churn—or the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service—is inevitable. Cancellations happen. But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and accept it. There are things you can do to decrease customer churn and protect what is arguably the most important aspect of revenue — the longtail subscription revenue of your customer accounts. Let's take a look at the seven most effective strategies for decreasing customer churn.

1. Understand the most common reasons for customer churn.

The first step in dealing with customer churn is to diagnose why the customer is canceling in the first place. There could be any number of reasons, but consistent themes and topics will emerge with the analysis. Churn doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a culmination of bug reports, feature requests, executive changes, response lags, unhappy sentiment, contract requests, renewal inquiries, and more.

If your team receives one or two pieces of feedback from a customer expressing frustration, it might not be the beginning of the end of the relationship. But, what about 10 times in 30 days? What if that customer is still in the onboarding phase of their journey? You'd want to know. And, more importantly, you’d want to take action to repair that relationship. 

2. Elevate customer engagement early on. 

Speaking of the onboarding phase, the first few weeks and months after a customer signs up for your product or service are crucial. This is when they get to know your product and develop a relationship with your team. Most importantly, this is when customers determine whether your service is really going to drive the value outlined in the sales process. If you can increase engagement during this period—through things like work sessions, listening workshops, self-service content, regular check-ins, etc.—you can set your customers up for success and decrease the likelihood that they'll churn later on.

3. Listen deeply to what customers are saying.

As previously mentioned, certain insights can be indicative of future churn—things like executive changes, contract requests, questions about the contract terms, unhappy sentiment, etc. By listening for these insights, you can proactively identify opportunities to guide the relationship early on and take steps to prevent them from turning into bigger issues down the road. Traditionally, for most B2B SaaS enterprises, this process hasn’t been scalable. Listening to your customers at scale is nearly impossible. Luckily, new developments in AI and machine learning have enabled customer intelligence platforms (CIPs) to analyze every email, support ticket, chat, and more for specific insights that empower your teams to focus on relationships that drive revenue. 

4. Take action on customer feedback quickly. 

If customers feel like their voices are being heard and that their feedback is being acted on, they're much more likely to stick around. As a baseline, make sure you have a system in place for collecting customer feedback (surveys, Net Promoter Score® emails, etc.) and that you're regularly reviewing that feedback to see what changes you can make to improve the customer experience. Additionally, take a step beyond soliciting feedback to ensure you’re capturing customer sentiment at scale. Nothing is more powerful than the unabridged, unbiased voice of the customer. As we mentioned earlier, that can only be accomplished at scale through a customer intelligence platform.  

5. Understand what features and services your customers want most. 

Find ways to add value for your customers—through things like upselling, cross-selling, or simply offering new features or services—you can reduce the likelihood of them canceling their subscription. At the end of the day, customers are either growing with you or away from you. Identifying trends in what your collective customer base asks for the most is a surefire way to keep your customers growing with you. Customers who feel like they're getting more bang for their buck are less likely to look elsewhere for a similar product or service staving off painful losses to competition.  

6. Provide the level of service you’d expect as a customer.

One of the best ways to prevent customers from churning is to provide them with the level of customer service you’d expect as a customer. If your customers feel like you're listening to their concerns, issues, and suggestions and that there is some actionable output, they’ll be less likely to look to a competing product that can provide them with what they need. The root of excellent customer service starts with simply listening and taking the next best action. Adopt the mantra of listening, acting, and improving. 

7. Seek to develop advocates, not just keep customers. 

Customer-obsessed companies don’t just service customers, their goal is to create advocates. Customer advocates are the ultimate customers. They serve as references and speak at industry events and webinars. They provide success stories, product reviews, and quotes for your marketing team. Developing advocates is about putting your customer first, and putting your customer first starts with listening at scale. It’s high time to start using all the feedback your customers give you daily to better understand their wants, needs, and issues so you and your teams can take the necessary action.  

For most B2B SaaS companies, customer churn is what we call the CODB — the cost of doing business. But the fact of the matter is that churn is a “rearview mirror” metric. Traditional telemetry-based reports and customer health scorecards capture what’s happened in the past, and most of the time, if you’re dealing with churn, you’re already too late. With CIPs, like Sturdy, you have valuable insights at your fingertips to look forward through the “windshield” and to see around the corners along the way. This allows you to detect and combat churn before it happens. It’s like a lead-gen for building more durable, profitable relationships. 

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Customer Churn

The Most Dangerous Threat to CROs

Joel Passen
July 1, 2025
5 min read

The most dangerous threat to CROs doesn’t live in the opportunity pipeline.

It's churn.

  • It doesn’t scream like a missed quarterly pipeline goal.
  • It doesn’t show up in dashboards until it’s too late.
  • It's rarely caught by a generic 'health score'.
  • It's the board meeting killer.

Retaining and growing our customers is the only repeatable, compounding, capital-efficient growth lever left in B2B businesses.

📉 CAC is way up.

📉 Channels are saturated.

📉 Talent is expensive.

📉 Competition is fierce.

📉 Switching costs are low.

The path to $100M used to be “sell, sell, sell.”

Today? It’s “land, retain, expand.”

No matter how strong your sales motions are or how slick your product or service looks during the sales process, if your customers are churning, you’re stuck in a leaky bucket loop of doom.

Every net-new dollar you win is offset by dollars you lose. It's just math.

Yet most GTM orgs still operate like retention is someone else’s problem. "That's a CS thing."

  • The CS team might “own” the customer post-sale.
  • Account Management may own the renewal and growth number.
  • Support is in the foxhole on the front line.
  • RevOps might model churn with last quarter’s data.
  • Marketing might send an occasional newsletter via email.
  • Finance may be leaning in on the forecasting.
  • Product is building things that supposedly the customers want.

But in reality, churn is the CRO's problem. We wear it - or should.

If your go-to-market motion isn’t designed to protect and grow customers from Day 1, you’re not just leaving money on the table — you’re setting fire to it.

Retention and expansion aren’t back-end functions. They’re front-and-center revenue motions.

The most valuable work these days starts after the contract is signed — not before.

We need to stop treating post-live as a department and start treating it as the engine of durable growth.

Software

Have you heard this from your CEO?

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

"How are we using AI internally?"

The drumbeat is real. Boards are leaning in. Investors are leaning in. Yet, too many leaders hardly use it. Most CS teams? Still making excuses.

🤦🏼 "We’re not ready."Translation: We don't know where to start, so I'm waiting to run into someone who has done something with it.

🤦🏼 "We need cleaner data."Translation: We’re still hoping bad inputs from fractured processes will magically produce good outputs. Everyone's data is a sh*tshow. Trust me. 🤹🏼♂️ "We're playing with it."Translation: We have that one person messing with ChatGPT - experimenting.

😕 "Just don't have the resources right now."Translation: We're too overwhelmed manually building reports, wrangling renewals, and answering tickets forwarded by the support teams.

🫃🏼 "We've got too many tools."Translation: We’re overwhelmed by the tools we bought that created a bunch of silos and forced us into constant app-switching.

🤓 "Our IT team won't let us use AI."Translation: We’ve outsourced innovation to a risk-averse inbox.

It's time to put some cowboy under that hat 🤠 . No one’s asking you to rebuild the data warehouse or perform some sacred data ritual. You don’t need a PhD in AI.

You can start small.

Nearly every AI vendor has a way for you to try their wares without hiring a team of talking heads to perform unworldly 🧙🏼 acts of digital transformation.

Where to start.

✔️ Pick a use case that will give you a revenue boost or reveal something you didn't know about your customers.

✔️ Choose something that directs valuable work to the valuable people you've hired.

✔️ Pick something with outcomes that other teams can use.

Pro Tip: Your CEO doesn't care about chatbots, knowledgebase articles, or things that write emails to customers.

What do you have to lose? More customers? Your seat at the table?

CX Strategy

Talent gets you started. Infrastructure gets you scale.

Joel Passen
April 29, 2025
5 min read

We obsess over hiring A-players. But even the best GTM talent will flounder if the foundation isn’t there.

I’ve seen companies overpay for “rockstars” who quit in 6 months—not because they weren’t capable, but because they were dropped into chaos. No ICP. Bad data. No process. No enablement. No system to measure or coach.

Great GTM teams aren’t built on purple squirrels. They’re built on a strong foundation.

That foundation looks like this:

✅ A crisp, written ICP and buyer persona (not just tribal knowledge)

✅ Accurate prospect data to target the right ICP

✅ A playbook that outlines how you win—and how you lose

✅ A clear point-of-view that your team can rally around in every email, call, and deck

✅ Defined stages, handoffs, and accountability across marketing, sales, CS

✅ A baseline reporting system to see what’s working—and what’s not

When this exists, you can onboard faster, coach better, and scale smarter. It's not easy, and it’s not sexy, but it works.

Want to cut CAC and increase ramp speed? Start with your infrastructure. Hire into a structure.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

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