5 Ways You Can Reduce Churn with WhatsApp

WhatsApp for Business is a text messaging channel built with small business owners in mind. With over two billion monthly active users around the world, it’s used by businesses as a powerful messaging channel to reduce customer churn.

Understanding customers is key to preventing them from churning. Although this is a challenging task, you can start by looking at the different customer experiences you are offering, and the spaces in between to fill up the gaps.

So, what are the main reasons for customer churn, and what ways you can reduce it? Here are a few of the most common things why customers churn:

• Price

By far one of the most common reasons customers churn is price. As consumers, we have become very cynical and picky with how we spend our money, and if there’s no added value, customer loyalty seems like a stretch.

• Product

Some customers might give your product a go and they’ll realize if it’s a good fit for them. Based on their impression of your product, they might come back for more, or they might never buy from you again.

• Customer experience

Do you go above and beyond for your customers? Do you listen to their customers’ needs? How quickly do you support them? Investing in customer support tools will help you acknowledge the areas where you can improve customer experience.

While these are some of the main reasons why customers churn, we want to focus on the things you can do to start them preventing from churning using WhatsApp – one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world.

Show more value

Value is a top reason for customer churn. However, the value doesn’t equate to price only. When we look at value, we take the whole customer experience into account. 55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee better service.

So, what does value look like? Added value can be:

• Free shipping
• Annual free support
• New features
• Excellent customer support
• Free returns
• Product/service quality
• Next day delivery

Convenience and customization are attributes that make your products or services more attractive to customers.

With the WhatsApp Business Platform, you can send alerts and notifications via chat messaging to let your customers know that you are one text away to answer all their questions.

Add WhatsApp to your channels’ mix and make it available for people to contact you. Customize conversations and integrate them into a wider communication strategy that allows everyone involved in the customer operations team to track the entire customer journey.

Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction scores are an important metric to assess what people think about your products and services. Giving feedback is easy but getting it can be quite challenging for businesses.

An article published in April 2018 shows that the average survey response rate was around 33%. Depending on the type of business, the figures can fall between 20% and 30%. Anything above 50% is a good survey response rate.

With WhatsApp being such an accessible and popular channel, you will find it’s more personal to ask customers for feedback on their latest customer support interaction via WhatsApp.

Sending surveys via rich messaging is not a new technique. WhatsApp provides functionality to easily design a workflow whereby responses are automated, and they change depending on the customer’s answer.

Offer out-of-hours customer support

Customers love the quick and accurate customer support. Speed, convenience, friendly, and knowledgeable support are the top valued factors by customers, according to PwC’s report.

Being able to offer out-of-hours customer support across a variety of channels will more likely increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Here are a few of the things you can deliver on WhatsApp to reduce customer churn:

• Updates on delivery and recent orders via automated chatbot
• Provide more information on product/service your customers might be interested in
• FAQ chatbots that will answer the most common customer inquiries

Note that all the customer conversations can be stored in a chat history so other agents dealing with different channels can view customer information. Also, they can pick up from where the conversation was left without having to repeat themselves.

Start marketing loyalty programs

When shoppers leave, it’s usually because they don’t like your product or the way you dealt with them. Generally speaking, customers go to your competition not because they have lower prices, but when you didn’t deal with their complaints properly. 

It’s not enough for customers to reduce your price, but it’s more valuable for them to earn their trust. So, how should you do that?

As we’ve mentioned before, to reduce customer churn, it’s essential to focus on brand-loyal customer perceptions. Start by asking the following questions:

• Did they complain about your business and its products or services?
• Did you respond to their communications?
• Did you recently send them promotions, incentives, upgrades, and discounts?
• Did they threaten to leave because of past customer support interactions?
• How long did they wait to get in touch with you?

All of these questions can indicate if you’ve done enough to hear their struggles and respond accordingly. If they have, then customer churn is prevented.

If they haven’t, then monitoring all the above things will help. Gathering all of this data might not be busy, especially if your communication channels are siloed.

WhatsApp easily integrates with your cloud communication platform, CRMs, and other systems that will help you see all customer journeys and communications, keeping it centralized and under control.

Managing all customer touchpoints and interactions will help you reduce customer churn and increase customer satisfaction.

Keep customers engaged

Customer engagement is important to building the customer loyalty that we already covered and driving repeat business, reducing customer churn.

Here are a few things that you should know about customer engagement:

• Keeping customers engaged will increase repeat business
• Maintaining customer engagement is an ongoing process
• Connecting to customers on their preferred communication channels increases retention
• Positive customer interactions benefit your revenue

WhatsApp Business is not for just sending plain messages, but it can keep the customer engaged through the use of images, videos, GIFs, and documents.

So, take advantage of these rich media features to connect better with your audience and make a long-lasting positive impression to reduce customer churn.

Conclusion

WhatsApp Business is ideal to work on your retention strategy and reduce customer churn.

There are many ways to use this communication channel, from chatting with your customers more often, answering inquiries, offering round-the-clock customer support, and offering personalized incentives.

Adding WhatsApp to your omnichannel strategy is smart and shows that you are proactively trying to keep customers engaged.

VoiceSage can offer a built-in solution to your communication strategy that can help you increase retention rates, craft effective customer journeys, and ultimately, reduce customer churn.