Customer Retention Software: The 8 Best Tools to Reduce Churn

You need to remember one thing about the relationships between you and your customers: taking care of them is critical. It might seem like a daunting challenge, but it can be easy, especially if you’re willing to put in the effort.

The most important factor is your ability to understand what they want and how they want it; luckily, there are numerous ways to do just that, such as surveys and market analysis.

What is a Customer Retention Software?

One of the best things businesses can do to ensure that their products and services will be relevant for years to come is to invest in customer retention. Gaining insight into clients’ experiences with your brand is a crucial part of the customer journey.

Customer retention software enables brands to listen to what their users are saying through digital sources like review sites and social media, as well as via more traditional digital methods like email marketing.

It’s essential to mention that analyzing customer data will be pretty helpful in identifying worrying patterns that concern your existing customers and better examining customer loyalty. As an outcome, you might reduce customer churn. This way, you will scale your ecommerce store, as you will be converting more leads into new customers than losing current ones due to churn.

How Do Customer Retention Software Programs Work?

Businesses that use customer retention software see higher customer retention rates than those that don’t. Their customers are more often satisfied and spend more as a result. The data you can access with this software allows your team to understand what’s causing churn and how to fix it — all before it’s too late! Let’s see how exactly does the “magic” work.

Track Customer Behavior

It’s crucial to check different metrics, like customer satisfaction, customer churn rate, and others. Using retention software allows you to predict potential adverse outcomes and act before it’s too late. 

And according to Nosto, 70% of clients mention it’s crucial for brands to “award” them with more personalized experiences.

But it’s not an attempt to avoid negative experiences — by tracking customer data, you will be more capable of identifying positive client patterns, too.

Reward Loyal Customers

These pieces of software collect valuable data for your clients. 61% of customers state they believe the best interactions with businesses are the ones where customers receive offers and freebies.

It’s not a surprise to anyone, you can retain customers better if you offer them rewards for their loyalty. More and more customers expect businesses to provide consumers with special deals to win their trust in the long term.

Improve Communication with Your Team

One of the most important things that happen when you utilize retention software is that you start predicting customer behavior and analyze it with your team. Then you can co-operate with the other staff members and come up with a better strategy to attract new customers and keep the existing ones.

Companies with a good understanding of customer retention can focus their efforts on the most critical areas. Customer support in real-time lowers cancellation rates and increases loyalty, and it boosts your bottom line by allowing you to reduce your advertising costs.

Why is Using a Retention Software Important?

As a growing business, you won’t always have enough employees to handle all the different things you’re trying to do. To address these challenges and give yourself more time to work on development, customer retention software helps to automate some of the business’s tasks — especially if those tasks are about keeping customers happy.

It can help in these situations by gathering critical insights about customer data and loyalty metrics (such as purchase history, sales velocity, and tenure). While nobody wants to pay much to retain customers, it will be a much better deal to spend some money on an effective customer retention tool rather than risk increasing your churn rate.

Finally, retention software can give you an unbiased report about your customers’ health, which is crucial. You can predict behavior and act proactively. Being able to react on time is a key skill in times when nobody wants to wait, and customers can quickly replace you with a competitor.

Types of Customer Retention Software

There are many types of customer retention software; it all depends on your current business needs and your team’s capacity. Let’s see some:

• Referral Program Software: Referral tools help you improve customer acquisition ratings by allowing customers to market your product. Instead of spending a lot of money on paid ads, you can give your customers cash (or its monetary equivalent in website vouchers), thus attracting them to your proposition. It is the closest you can get to word-of-mouth marketing that is proven to work.

• Customer Relationship Management Tools: CRMs are popular because they allow you to collect data from various sources. Thus, all of your teams could “add” value to your customers. By creating customer profiles and adding a variety of data to the software, you ensure you can provide a more in-depth customer experience and achieve better customer service. CRM tools are a must-have for big teams, especially international ones.

• Gamification Software: We cannot discuss gamification and forget to mention the customer journey. As the name indicates, gamification software creates different “levels” achieved upon reaching a purchasing target. You can collect points, book travels, etc. Many big commission-based mediator platforms (like Takeaway or Booking) utilize gamification to promote their service.

• Loyalty programs: Loyalty programs drive better customer feedback by offering additional benefits for existing customers. They are a powerful marketing weapon and look a bit like gamification software, but they are not exactly like them. Loyalty programs like Amazon Prime, for example, can drive consistent sales; thus, they are a much-preferred option for enterprises.

• Personalization tools: Personalization software can help you create a tailored user experience for shoppers. Learning about your customers and their needs, it can generate customized messages for them, no matter what their stage in the buyer’s journey may be. Hence, that’s how you create a targeted marketing campaign.

The 8 Best Customer Retention Software Tools for Businesses

As with every industry, some software solutions simply stand out from the crowd. Let’s see the better performers (our pack leaders).

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is the help desk tool and online engagement platform that helps you provide fantastic customer service. With live chat, knowledge base tools, and forums, Zendesk creates opportunities to turn frustrated customers into raving fans who share their experiences with friends.

What makes Zendesk a fantastic tool is the very intuitive user interface and a superb ticketing system. If someone has worked with JIRA, you know what we are talking about.

Another cool thing is the option to add canned responses that can add automation and how well you can manage roles.

Zendesk has two different platforms: one for Sales and one for Customer Service. The sales plan starts at $19 per month, while Customer Service — at $49 per user. It’s a decent deal for startup businesses and a tremendous value for money for scaling teams.

2. Qualaroo

Customer satisfaction surveys can tell you a lot about your business. However, NPS surveys aren’t the best way to assess how satisfied customers are with your product or service. Qualaroo provides various tools that allow you to interact with potential and current customers, learn what they think, and get more specific insights into how they feel about different aspects of your website.

These surveys can “catch the mood” of your users and predict their next move, whether it will be a positive or negative one.

Qualaroo is a viable solution that doesn’t break the bank at all. If you have under 100k monthly page views, you can pay as low as $80, which is a superb deal.

3. Kissmetrics

Sometimes, users sign up for a product but quickly realize they’ve made the wrong choice, which can lead to high churn rates and frustrated customers. Instead of assuming where you need to improve, track user behavior to pinpoint problem areas.

By investing in a technology platform like Kissmetrics, businesses can gain highly detailed traffic insights and valuable customer trends — all crucial information for growing business. And most importantly — companies can track the right audiences rather than guessing what is good and what’s bad, hurting brand reputation along the way.

Kissmetrics isn’t cheap — the monthly plan starts at $299 per month billed annually, but it’s well worth its money. It allows integrations, up to 3 users and up to 10 thousand tracked users. Of course, you can also go to the next level if you need more.

4. Hubspot

HubSpot is a platform that empowers businesses to attract visitors, convert leads, and close & retain customers. It does this through an intuitive UX and a unified codebase. The software helps companies manage their marketing, sales, service, and operations efforts — at the end of the day, it makes these businesses more effective in growing their business.

What makes Hubspot a top CRM solution is the stability of the software, its maturity, and, most crucially — the vast choice of options you have available. However, Hubspot isn’t the right software if you’re starting your business endeavor. It has hefty price tags, which are bearable for big teams but might be too big for you to swallow.

Starting at $45 per month for only 1,000 contacts, it goes rapidly up. Still, if you manage to use Hubspot’s variety of features, it will be worth each cent!

5. Yotpo

Yotpo offers a simple and easy-to-use review management platform that helps businesses get more reviews and ratings on their page. With Yotpo, brands can respond to customer reviews, post content as they’re received, schedule reviews, so they come out when you want them to, and create a personalized review experience for each individual visitor.

It’s great that it offers a free version, but even if you opt for a plan, there are customizable solutions, and you can quickly jump on something that isn’t expensive — like the Growth plan, which starts at $19 per month. It’s safe to say that Yotpo is an excellent solution for startups and businesses with a small customer base, and it will help you generate vital reviews to extend your business.

6. Zoho CRM

Zoho is one of the most complete customer relationship management (CRM) tools, providing unique features that all businesses need to succeed. With Zoho, users can easily organize their contacts, manage large amounts of data, and train employees — allowing small and medium-sized businesses to easily send marketing messages or create discounts and coupons in just minutes.

What makes Zoho CRM great is that it is part of Zoho Suite, which has over 45 other integrated programs, making it an excellent choice for companies which want to utilize a single kit for all of their needs.

It starts at 14 EUR/month billed annually, but you get a lot of features for your money. And even if you upgrade, you won’t pay much more, which is even better.

7. Segment

Segment allows businesses to improve their customer experiences by sending and collecting data from hundreds of platforms, including Google Analytics and Salesforce. Segment’s goal is to help enterprises better understand their user base to deliver personalized experiences across storefronts and back-end systems.

As one of the best customer retention software on the market, you will feel that it’s easier to make loyal customers when you have access to a premium product. And if you’re starting, there is even a free version.

Make no mistake, though. This software is worth every cent, but it doesn’t come cheap. The starter plan costs $120 per month and covers up to 10K visitors. For each 1K, you pay $10, so if you have something around 100K, you will pay in excess of $1,000 each month.

8. Loyalty Lion

Automating your loyalty program and rewarding customers with points, discounts, or free products is a great way to increase customer loyalty — but only if you have the right software.

LoyaltyLion is one software that lets you customize and tailor your loyalty program accordingly. With its set of incredible tools applicable to nearly all industries and business sizes, it’s no wonder that businesses worldwide are using the service to retain their customers.

The software is excellent but isn’t a good option for startups and small businesses, as it costs $359 per month on an annual subscription, and it’s just the basic version. Also, it covers up to 2,000 orders, which might be much more than what you initially make. Still, switching to the following tiers makes great sense if you have volumes.

How to Choose the Best Software for Your Business

You cannot choose suitable software for your company before considering your business needs first. The first thing you need to realize is what type of marketing technology stack you have to track new customers and retain your existing ones.

Second of all, you should prioritize a specific customer group, and you might have a successful retention strategy with younger demographics. Still, suppose you offer a variety of products for older adults. In that case, you need to consider retargeting campaigns and other means to attract these potential new buyers as soon as possible.

If your customer attrition rate spikes, you might need software to help reduce churn. But as you see, growing your ecommerce store is a game of many ball games, and focusing on one area might not be enough.

Leverage Verfacto to Improve Customer Retention and Reduce Churn Rate  

That’s where Verfacto comes in. As part of the RFM model segment (RFM – Recency, Frequency, Monetary), it tracks the whole spectrum of activities your customers do — thus, allowing you to identify patterns more accurately.

Verfacto leverages success as it helps you understand why customers stick to your brand and why some clients decide to churn.

You need to get the best use of your customer data, which is why the ability to access powerful measuring tools like Verfacto can increase customer loyalty while reducing churn rate.

Conclusion

Customer retention tools are existential for modern-day businesses, and they provide incremental value to any organization, especially SaaS ones and ecommerce stores. Letting a tool analyze your results and automate campaigns will not only save you time, but it will be a great move to identify potential problems, resolve them promptly, and make loyal customers.