How Customer Attrition Data Factors into Your Customer Retention Strategy

This post originally appeared on the Atrium blog. Authored by ADAM ROARK.

Getting started with an effective customer retention strategy isn’t as easy as one would hope. As we tackle the concepts that make for an effective customer retention strategy, we revisit our data-driven approach and Atrium’s method of determining your readiness to adopt intelligent solutions in aiding customer retention.

Atrium uses a readiness assessment that can be leveraged by sales and strategy teams within your organization to assess the maturity of your company’s retention strategy. In order to effectively evaluate your organization’s current maturity level, we evaluate against six key principles:

1. Customer Attrition Data
2. Strategic Initiative
3. Data Governance
4. Existing Application
5. Functional
6. New Frontier

In this article, we will be focusing on the real costs associated with customer attrition, and how your organization can determine the financial impact of losing customers.

Customer Attrition Data… and the Cost of Losing Customers

When we look at customer attrition data, we are really focusing on the financial impact knowledge your company has when it comes to the cost of losing your customers. How are you measuring that data to determine whether you understand it, or how you are actively seeking to prevent it?

Every organization understands that losing a customer is a negative part of conducting business. Tracking customer attrition data is a key metric in understanding and determining the health and viability of your organization within a given industry. Knowing how many customers you’re losing, the impact of attrition on revenue, and the reasons for customers leaving all contribute to an effective retention strategy. There is a certain inevitability that a customer might churn, but this metric can be managed through a data-driven approach.

3 Key Metrics Associated with Your Customer Attrition Data

Atrium’s approach to customer attrition data focuses on three key metrics: Financial Impact Knowledge, Understanding of Attrition Data, and Success Measure for Preventing Customer Attrition.

Financial Impact Knowledge

With Financial Impact Knowledge, we look at whether or not your organization is equipped with the knowledge to understand how your data provides insight into the financial impact that customer attrition has on your business. Atrium helps determine and calculate the different impact of attrition and the cost related to future loss of revenue and the cost of acquiring new customers.

Understanding of Attrition Data

For Understanding of Attrition Data, we educate our clients on the conceptual understanding of how their data provides key insights into why customer attrition is occurring. Do you understand the nature of attrition trends? Determining whether attrition is a sudden event or a slow diminution of spend is a vital method in combating the risk of it occurring.

Success Measure for Preventing Customer Attrition

Finally, for Success Measure for Preventing Customer Attrition, we guide organizations in how they can clearly define accurate measures around attrition data, so that they can create measures of success.

Case Study: Driving Student Enrollment and Retention with Tableau CRM

Let’s take a look at a customer success story with a focus on retention. Pearson needed to discover what factors drive student enrollment and retention in a rapidly changing education market. It was hard to determine which factors could help to optimize student journeys and success, and siloed data and incomplete augmented analytic tool sets made analysis impossible. Pearson saw the need to plan an effective data strategy to tackle these issues as they migrated to Salesforce Sales Cloud.

In order to successfully predict and manage student engagement for their customers, Pearson partnered with Atrium to implement Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics). And with Einstein Discovery, Pearson was able to identify key characteristics that influence student acquisition and retention.

Pearson flipped their implementation on its head by implementing Tableau CRM first and then using those metrics, analytics, and other data they knew they wanted to collect to guide their Sales Cloud implementation. This enabled them to more effectively design their internal Sales Cloud data model and deployment, giving them the ability to show customers quantitative data to help prioritize and improve student journeys.

Pearson now has a better understanding of the most important factors in increasing enrollment and retention. With Einstein Discovery, they can identify opportunities to enhance and improve the student enrollment journey for prospective students, as well as maximize student retention, leading to an expected 20% cost per acquisition lifetime value ratio improvement. Pearson can also design and use Sales Cloud more effectively to serve their internal users by promoting dashboards and their customers.

We Can Do More with Your Customer Attrition Data

Atrium’s approach to customer retention strategies simplifies an otherwise complex and long-term process. By using our readiness assessment, we can help your organization determine how to measure success for attrition metrics, understand attrition data, and calculate the financial impact of losing customers.

Learn more about Atrium’s services and see how we can support your customer retention strategy.