How To Mitigate Client Churn With Customer Intelligence

How customer relationship insights such as lonely client, multithreading analysis, and succession planning can help you mitigate client attrition and grow accounts. 

One thing you can count on is that the economy will have unexpected, sometimes even unexplainable, ups and downs. For businesses, times of economic downtown make it critical to batten down the hatches–hope for the best but prepare for the worst. This is when vendors and contracts are reviewed, and all resources are heavily scrutinized. During economic uncertainty, the smartest way to safeguard your business is to retain your existing client base and grow from there. It becomes mission-critical to keep your clients happy, so you can leverage that success to expand your business–growing existing contracts, getting referrals, and, most importantly, sustaining your bottom line. 

Mitigating client churn is an essential pillar of business growth that requires a deep understanding of your client’s needs and the value you provide–in short, it requires strong relationships. Solid business relationships are built on trust, engagement, and mutual understanding of where each draws value. Left unchecked, relationships become shallow and weak enough to deteriorate into churn territory, where clients start to lose an understanding of the value you can provide. Gaining insight into the strength of your revenue teams’ relationships can help you avoid losing clients. And doing so at a time when finding new clients is more difficult is good for business in the long and short run. 

In this article, we’ll share how leveraging relationship insights, like those provided by Introhive’s Customer Intelligence platform, can help firms mitigate client churn.

The Leading Indicators of Client Churn

Of course, there are many churn red flags to look out for in your client-based relationships. Clients leave for many reasons; price, different capabilities, service models, and spotting those ready to jump ship can be difficult if you don’t have the right tools. Reporting on and analyzing some of the leading indicators for change–differences in behavior from your clients–can go a long way in preventing the loss. The main areas to monitor are client engagement, meaningful account changes, and contract renewal /cycle time. If you can identify clients at risk of churn before the fact, you’re more likely to retain that business. But, short of making direct contact every day, how can you monitor and score your relationship with your clients?

Lonely Client Analysis Ensures No Clients are Left Behind

Just a 5% increase in client retention can result in 25-95% more revenue, meaning every business needs a strategy to keep its existing clients engaged. Introhive’s Customer Intelligence platform’s Lonely Client Analysis layers relationship trends against the latest interaction date to ensure all your accounts have proper coverage. This gives you an objective view of how engaged your clients are and how healthy your relationships are. Account managers will no longer have to employ reactive tactics and instead be able to proactively manage their key accounts by focusing on leading engagement indicators that help establish the right relationships and cadence before an account becomes at risk. These insights help your team monitor client health to stop churn before it happens. With the insights from the Lonely Client Analysis, you’ll be able to pinpoint where you need to build stronger relationships and ensure you have multiple champions within that organization. 

Video: How To Mitigate Client Churn With Customer Intelligence

Maintain Multithreaded Client Relationships to Prove Cross Functional Value 

Working with multiple champions at a client organization isn’t a new strategy. If sellers want to win in today’s complex selling environments, they must build connections with as many people on the buyer’s side as possible. Just like multithreading your sales opportunities ensures you have buy-in across an organization, it can also help retain your business because you provide cross-functional value. 

Multithreading Insights, a key feature of the Customer Intelligence platform, provides dashboards and actionable insights for establishing engagement and influence with a broad and deep pool of contacts across opportunities and critical accounts. Job title scores ensure you’re interacting with stakeholders within the organization who have budget and authority. Build your influence across the business by actively engaging multiple stakeholders across departments and management levels. It’s like investing in insurance for your deal, and Multithreading Insights tells you where you have low engagement from relatively few contacts within a few departments. This is where you should invest time into building stronger relationships with more people. Multithreading reporting also showcases gaps in types of contacts, for example, key influencers versus individual contributors. 

Succession Planning Prepares You for Inevitable Changes

You can’t avoid staffing changes, but you can avoid the risk of relationship gaps and single threaded relationships. Provide a smooth account transition by assessing the relationships owned by departing employees and identifying the next best colleague to assign. Succession insights give you the context to identify the account manager with the next strongest relationships to assume positions of outgoing key account managers. With an estimated 20% of your contacts changing jobs each year, unexpected work departures can leave teams in sticky situations. You need to ensure you have a well-orchestrated plan to whom you’ll transfer critical accounts, knowledge, and relationships. Arm incoming relationship owners with a complete historical record of all interactions and notes to accelerate awareness of the state of the account. Easily spot a complete list of at-risk relationships to facilitate a smooth and seamless transition. Reduce concern and risk of churn by maintaining a strong client experience.

There’s nothing more valuable than your existing client base. Nurturing that base and ensuring those relationships are strong should always be a top priority, especially during times of economic uncertainty. Keeping an eye on Lonely Client insights helps identify accounts that need outreach. Multithreading helps your teams understand what accounts need deeper, cross-functional relationships. Succession planning can help ensure that when the client manager leaves, there are no gaps in client service. Leveraging relationship insights, like those gleaned from the Lonely Client, Multithreading, and Succession Planning analysis’, can help you proactively identify potential signs of client churn and enact the right strategies to stop it before it can impact your business. 

To learn more about these solutions and how they may apply to your business, book a demo here.