Effective Ways to Reduce Churn and Increase Retention

I have led product for multiple Ycombinator starts and one of the challenges we have had recently with all the budget cuts is rising churn. We spent a whole quarter trying to tackle it and here are strategies that worked 1. Keep track of your champion One of the core reasons our customers churned was the champion who initially bought the product left the company or got laid off. One of the strategies that worked well for us was to closely keep track of champions and if a role change was detected or if their company was doing layoffs, we would reach out to find alternate champions inside the company! 2. Identify frustrated customers & change in usage I strong suggest using some kind of automation to automatically identify customers' whose usage decreases or identify customers who are expression frustration/pain on any of your communication channel We personally used an app called Churro. Reaching out and learning what was going on deeply has helped up increase our retention by at least 10% 3. Measure NPS This goes back to (2) but I also strongly suggest sending out an NPS survey to most of your customers every few months. This helps you both identify which customers are at risk of leaving and also understand what pain points they might be having, which can be fixed to save those accounts. I personally recommend using the Superhuman NPS survey. Its basically just a format you can use to send via Typeform or Google form 4. Ship improvements quickly Finally but most importantly, once you identify pain points that are causing customers to leave inside the product, ship improvements quickly and communicate it back to the relevant customers. This not only increase retention but sales can often upsell these improvements or close new deals faster! And that's about it! We tried about 20-25 strategies, most did not show any results except these 4. LMK if I missed something what worked for you!