Customer Experience Is Not Your Problem—It’s Customer Churn

Churn is the problem.

Customers leave, and when they do, the company has to find new customers to replace them. That means more marketing, more selling, more promoting, and overall, more effort, just to get back to where the company started. And if these efforts are successful, you’ll ideally bring in more customers than you lost. When you think about the investment to get customers, the research findings (and there are many) that claim it costs much more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one ring true.

Of course, customers churn for different reasons. Sometimes they move, pass away, no longer need what you sell or leave for competitive reasons such as price.

But there is another reason customers leave that is within the company’s control, and that is the experience.

One of the top drivers of churn is inconsistency.

A company can deliver a great experience nine times, but if the 10th experience is bad enough, the customer might ask themselves, “What’s going to happen the next time I do business with them?”

That’s when a customer experience problem becomes a churn problem.

Stop Thinking About CX as an Experience

The words customer experience can cause us to focus on individual interactions with the company. Was the employee friendly? Was the website easy to use? Did the package arrive on time? Did customer support resolve a complaint or problem? All of these matter. At any given interaction, you can fail the customer and plant a negative seed. And while one negative interaction could be bad enough to cause a customer to leave, most customers judge the experience based on more than one. They form their opinion of the company over time. Each interaction either reinforces their expectation or creates doubt about what they can expect the next time.

So what has been an obvious question about customer experience has to change. Instead of asking, “Did we give the customer a good experience?,” ask, “Are we giving the customer an experience that makes them want to continue to do business with us?”

There’s a big difference between those two questions. The latter connects customer experience to customer retention, which is one of the most important reasons to invest in customer experience in the first place.

Consistency Creates Confidence

Think about the companies you enjoy doing business with. Chances are you know what the experience is going to be the next time. That’s consistency, and consistency leads to trusting the experience. That trust leads to confidence in the company or brand.

Customers don’t need every experience be a WOW, over-the-top experience. They need the experience to be predictable. They want to know that what happened last time—an experience that met their expectations—is going to happen the next time.

The opposite is also true. Inconsistency creates uncertainty. Once customers start wondering, “Which experience am I going to get today?,” the relationship begins to head downhill.

Churn Often Starts Before the Customer Leaves

A problem with churn is that it’s a historical measurement. By the time you realize the customer is gone, it has already happened. The reasons behind the customer’s decision to leave started earlier than when they finally chose to do so.

Maybe the customer had to call twice to get an issue resolved. Maybe one employee was helpful, and another wasn’t. Maybe delivery was dependable for months and suddenly became unreliable. There are many small problems that create doubt. The first time any of these happens it might not be a big deal, but when several of these problems occur, it becomes a pattern, and eventually, the customer loses confidence.

That’s why measuring churn is not enough. It doesn’t explain why. To understand why there’s churn, look at the experiences that cause customers to leave. That’s where the opportunity lies. Any friction found in your process that is eliminated is a step closer to always meeting a customer’s expectations.

Make Churn a Customer Experience Metric

Just as companies measure sales and revenue, many measure churn. But they view it as a sales or marketing metric. It must also be a customer experience metric.

If customers are leaving because of the experience, the CX team needs to understand why. And to an earlier point, they must know what happened before they left. Where did the experience break down? Was it a one-time failure or part of a pattern? And most importantly, was the experience inconsistent with what the customer had come to expect?

The goal isn’t to simply make customers happy. It is to create an experience they can count on. It must be one that gives them confidence to come back.

Final Words

For most of my career, if a client called and said, “I’ve got a customer service (or customer experience) problem,” my answer would be, “Let me help you fix that.” From there we would drill down to determine the root of the problem, many of which are mentioned above. But if you really think about it, the real problem isn’t customer service or CX. It’s churn. However …

The solution to churn is customer experience!

To reiterate one of the most important points of this article, stop asking, “How do we improve our customer experience?,” and start asking, “What experiences are causing our customers to leave?”

Then, take it to the next level by asking, “Where are we inconsistent?”

And once you figure that out, ask this question: “What are we doing throughout the customer’s entire experience that makes them confident the next experience will be just as good as the last?”