5 strategies to reduce churn

3 ways eve Wholesale supports Distributors

As a vendor, we’re always at least one step away from the end customer.

While we don’t operate in the service layer, I am obsessed with service. Part of my job is to find ways to help our Partners become more profitable, through growth strategies and retention.

Here are 3 ways that we provide support:

1. Growth insights

If you buy hosted voice and connectivity from eve Wholesale, we’ll arm you with clear data that presents your growth trends and highlights churn activity.

This data is designed to feed into your growth and retention metrics, so you can stay ahead of emerging trends and spot opportunities early on.

There’s no such thing as ‘one size fits all”, so we take a consultative approach and present insights that really matter to you.

If you’d like to book your growth consultation, let me know – Louise Abbey.

2. Supporting your resellers with churn

While I’m a step away from your relationship with your reseller, I have ideas about how you can support those businesses which are experiencing high churn volumes:

1. Identify – which of your resellers are most affected by churn? Perform analysis on their data, and gather high-level insights.
2. Communicate – open up the conversation by contacting each reseller individually. Share broad insights about industry churn trends, and position yourself as a source of support and information.
3. Gather context – invite your resellers to churn consultations. Gather more information and demonstrate that you care. Help them make sense of it.
4. Influence – share strategies around how they can tackle the problem.
5. Measure – true value comes when you can support your partners to make a tangible difference. Consider creating shared customer retention metrics to help heighten the focus and demonstrate your approach to partnership.

3. 5 talking points to open up the conversation

Talking to your resellers about churn demonstrates that you’re tuned into industry trends. It allows you to open the door, so you can add value and prove your role as their service provider.

Here are five pieces of advice for resellers:

1. Make customer retention a business objective

Everyone in your business has the power to affect customer retention, right down to how they pick up the phone. Create an environment where everyone is aiming for exceptional.

Sharing channel trends can help to provide context, be open and add churn to the agenda.

Report on your churn levels and make this data visible throughout your organisation. Make people sit up and pay attention and help them understand how they can help to influence positive change.

2. Work out why your customers are leaving

This is harder than it sounds, as often once the customers have gone, they’ve gone. But try to gather whatever data you can and avoid the feedback process becoming anecdotal. Gather facts and clearly report on the data you have.

There are lots of reasons that your customers might leave, for example, poor service, competition, pricing, and acquisitions. Define these and begin to report on them. This helps you to identify the areas that you have the power to change.

Consider holding exit interviews, just like when a member of staff leaves, Make it easy and worthwhile for leavers to give you their time.

3. Be real about the role you play for your customers

Consider introducing a customer health score. There are a few ways to measure that, look for the factors that matter for your business – for example:

• how often does a customer engage with your team? 
• How critical is your product to their business?
• How many products do they take from you today?
• How happy are they? 

4. Breathe fresh life into your customer relationships

Most resellers have a lot of customer data but they don’t know what to do with it. Stop wondering, and do something, even if it’s simple. Segment your base, it can be as basic as new, existing and dormant. Share meaningful content that plays into where they are right now.

If you’re a step beyond that, you can use data to identify other ways to help. This goes beyond product gap analysis and highlighting sales opportunities – you can use data to predict technical support needs, so you can be a step ahead, proving value early on in the game.

5. Build genuine connections

Email Marketing is the ‘go to’ for most, but it has limitations. Blend in other channels like social media marketing. 

Face-to-face is hugely effective right now. But don’t leave it all down to the Account Manager – introduce your Marketers, send your Support team out for a site visit, and get closer.

How to use this content:

If you would like to use the 5 points above to start conversations with your resellers, fill your boots! Copy it, paste it, adapt it to suit your style.

Here are some ideas about how you can use these 5 points to start conversations with your resellers:

• Delve into one or more of the 5 points above and expand, demonstrating how you can add value
• Create your own simple video, like the one below
• Create a collection of themed digital content, e.g. a blog post, social posts and a marketing email

Did I mention I love service?

I’m on a mission to make businesses more profitable by making customers the number one focus.

I’ll happily talk to anyone who shares my obsession with service. If you’d like to chat call me on our main number, or send me an email – Louise Abbey.