Are You Listening to the Silence in the Customer Journey?

If you woke up one day and set out to identify your customers most likely to cancel your service, how would you begin? If youre like me, youd look for negative events along the customer journey that might correlate to a future cancellation. In fact, I once took on such a project and employed this strategy.

And I was pretty darn wrong. For instance, I assumed that support calls would eventually lead to attrition if the customer was experiencing pain with the product experience. In reality, a customer who issues ten support calls each week and calls his/her salesperson once a week to gripe about the product, the service or the company is quite engaged. By and large, that type of customer cares deeply about the product and is willing to invest the time to input support tickets or call their sales rep nine times a day to talk product roadmap.

Conversely, the real threats to attrition among your customer base are the customers making no sound at all. Those are the customers that require your attention. What if the power user left the company? What if the customer is blocked for a technical reason? Perhaps the customer was never properly onboarded? Worst of all, what if theyre working with a competitor? The lack of data doesnt tell the whole story, but it tells you that there is a story going on that you dont know about.

Journey mapping should be as much about tracking product usage as it is marketing and sales touchpoints. Look for trends around usage and compare that against benchmarks in order to track those customers and reach out. A good place to start is tracking the number of product events across the customer user base and the duration between those events.

Armed with the right data, different steps can be employed: account management outreach, remarketing efforts, customer success engagement or partner introductions. Re-engaging with those whove fallen off the beaten path means getting current customers to fall in love with the mission of your company all over again.