Churn/retention

Too many organisations are focused on winning new customers and overlook the importance of having a robust retention strategy in place. Populus’s retention research helps clients understand the root causes of churn and the emotional impact it has on a brand.

Churn research provides its own unique challenges with ex-customers often having an emotionally charged reaction to our clients' brand or a complete lack of engagement with the brand. In either case the outcome is an unwillingness to take part in a lapsed customer interview. It is for this reason we have a strong preference for conducting lapsed customer interviews via the telephone. We conduct all interviews from our Newcastle call centre with a specialised team who are trained in objection handling but who remain sensitive to a delicate situation.

Our diagnostic framework begins with a top level view of the drivers for churn. This is always spontaneous in nature and often elicits an emotional reply. We follow this with a drill down into specific issues and concerns which tends to generate a more rational response. This framework therefore allows clients to understand the strength of feeling and the specific issues impacting their brand.

We further examine the reasons for churn to determine whether churn is client lead, i.e. customers are being pushed to leave or whether its competitor driven i.e. customers being by other to join them. And irrespective of the trigger for churn we conduct loss analysis to determine who is doing most damage to our client’s customer base.

We close the framework by establishing how easy or difficult it might be to win customers back and what impact specific offers would have had in preventing churn in the first place.