Irrespective of the industry you represent, users buy or pay for your app just because they feel it can offer solutions to their problems. If any of your users canceled the app subscription it is because some aspects of your product could not deliver the value that customer purchased it for. It results in churn and going for another software app.
Churn is one of the most responsible factors in harming the growth of a business. Having a deeper understanding of the churn rate will help to identify crucial aspects playing a key role in optimizing user experience. Better the user experience you can ensure, lower the churn rate your software will have. Let us now see how by enhancing the UX you can address the churn factors.
What is churning and churn rate?
Way before you can start finding ways to prevent churn, it is more important to have a grasp of what churn means for a business. As per the basic definition, churn rate refers to the number of users or customers having stopped using the product offered by you. This number, when considered in a given time frame, refers to the churn rate of that time.
Addressing churn by perfecting the basics of UX
When you know how to calculate and determine churn it is time to seek ways to address it. The churn rate of a business can tell how many of the existing customers prefer the product offered by the company. Whether the company should give more focus on existing customers or should focus solely on getting new customers, this is determined by the churn rate. Often perfecting the product with the basic UX design principles, results in great result in addressing churn rate.
Why are UX basics so important? Well, to get a positive reply to this question mobile app developers have to focus on a series of questions concerning user interaction and their motivation. First of all, why the customers who have been churned just stopped using your product? Is your customer support not satisfactory? Or, is there a better competitive option making a better proposition to your customers? Or, do the typical customer needs for a lot of people changed all of a sudden and consequently your product suddenly seems to lack value?
Well, all the above-mentioned questions need to be addressed to make your product valuable and viable for your customers.
Finding ways to create more value
The surest way to reduce churn is by delivering more value for your customer. There are certain moments experienced by your customers that come with a delightful 'Wow' response. Creating such moments more and more, you can become irreplaceable for them. How to know about such moments that your users cherished most? User testing and user interviews allow you to identify the most appreciated product features. Secondly, you can always try to reduce the steps involved in signup to enhance ease of use. Moreover, you can help boosting the value by offering most noteworthy features.
Boost performance and efficiency
By allowing smooth, fast paced and glitch free user experience of your app you can encourage users to stick to your product. For this, it is important to evaluate the pulling factors. For this, try to focus on qualitative and quantitative user data comprising user task flows, the triggers, and challenges. Often user interviews will provide you credible insights on how they prefer completing tasks and what they are actually getting. By addressing the difficulties involved and performance issues you can add value to their experience.
Let them remain hooked
A habit of using a product regularly make customer build a bond with it. So, forming habit for regular use is important to reduce churn rate. Hook Model is seen as effective as it involves maneuvers to evoke highly positive emotional outcome from the user. Such responses create deeper resonance and actually persuade users to make frequent use of the software. A Hook Model typically involves four different elements introduced below.
Trigger: Trigger is nothing but the external stimulus arousing the internal need of a user.
Action: An action causes motivation for another action with the anticipation of a reward.
Variable Reward: When the reward remains uncertain and variable, the user cannot figure out what he can get.
Investment: Investment refers to the repeat of triggering action so that the user get the opportunity of receiving more benefits or rewards.
Fixing poor customer service
Customers constantly need to be supported just to have enough motivation for continuing with a product. According to the report by U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest reason why businesses lose customers is the poor customer service. A whopping "68% customers stop using a product just because of the way they are treated.
How can you fix it? First of all, through analytics you need to detect the specific problems with the customer service your business has. Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is nothing but the ranking of your customer service on a 0-10 scale is a great way to know where your customer service stands. An NPS score 9-10 clearly tells that the customer is a loyal enthusiast and you have almost no issue in customer experience. An NPS rate of 7-8 means though the customers are satisfied but not enough loyal to the product. Lastly, NPS score 0-6 always tells about utter unhappiness about your product. This group of customers is most susceptible to churn.
Boosting customer engagement
Only when you look at customer engagement you can know whether the UX lacks any real value or the users should be informed better about the app effectiveness? Does your customer look for certain features but not being able to find? Or, do you offer features that are actually pointless to your customers?
Offering a tutorial or easy guideline is a nice way to keep them well informed and make them capable of the software use. Secondly, following best practices principle in the product design is a great way to ensure engagement. Then, your product should use the language understood by your customers. Most importantly, it is important to follow the established naming convention as to prevent distraction.
About Author: Juned Ghanchi is the co-founder and Marketing director of IndianAppDevelopers, a mobile application development company that specializes in IOS and Android based world-class game and enterprise mobile app development. He creates strategies closely with marketing team and executes it to produce leads and community engagement.
Original post: How to address the churning factors with better UX?
