Customer Churn

How to reduce customer churn rate

By
Joel Passen
November 8, 2022
5 min read

In any business, customer churn—or the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service—is inevitable. Cancellations happen. But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and accept it. There are things you can do to decrease customer churn and protect what is arguably the most important aspect of revenue — the longtail subscription revenue of your customer accounts. Let's take a look at the seven most effective strategies for decreasing customer churn.

1. Understand the most common reasons for customer churn.

The first step in dealing with customer churn is to diagnose why the customer is canceling in the first place. There could be any number of reasons, but consistent themes and topics will emerge with the analysis. Churn doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a culmination of bug reports, feature requests, executive changes, response lags, unhappy sentiment, contract requests, renewal inquiries, and more.

If your team receives one or two pieces of feedback from a customer expressing frustration, it might not be the beginning of the end of the relationship. But, what about 10 times in 30 days? What if that customer is still in the onboarding phase of their journey? You'd want to know. And, more importantly, you’d want to take action to repair that relationship. 

2. Elevate customer engagement early on. 

Speaking of the onboarding phase, the first few weeks and months after a customer signs up for your product or service are crucial. This is when they get to know your product and develop a relationship with your team. Most importantly, this is when customers determine whether your service is really going to drive the value outlined in the sales process. If you can increase engagement during this period—through things like work sessions, listening workshops, self-service content, regular check-ins, etc.—you can set your customers up for success and decrease the likelihood that they'll churn later on.

3. Listen deeply to what customers are saying.

As previously mentioned, certain insights can be indicative of future churn—things like executive changes, contract requests, questions about the contract terms, unhappy sentiment, etc. By listening for these insights, you can proactively identify opportunities to guide the relationship early on and take steps to prevent them from turning into bigger issues down the road. Traditionally, for most B2B SaaS enterprises, this process hasn’t been scalable. Listening to your customers at scale is nearly impossible. Luckily, new developments in AI and machine learning have enabled customer intelligence platforms (CIPs) to analyze every email, support ticket, chat, and more for specific insights that empower your teams to focus on relationships that drive revenue. 

4. Take action on customer feedback quickly. 

If customers feel like their voices are being heard and that their feedback is being acted on, they're much more likely to stick around. As a baseline, make sure you have a system in place for collecting customer feedback (surveys, Net Promoter Score® emails, etc.) and that you're regularly reviewing that feedback to see what changes you can make to improve the customer experience. Additionally, take a step beyond soliciting feedback to ensure you’re capturing customer sentiment at scale. Nothing is more powerful than the unabridged, unbiased voice of the customer. As we mentioned earlier, that can only be accomplished at scale through a customer intelligence platform.  

5. Understand what features and services your customers want most. 

Find ways to add value for your customers—through things like upselling, cross-selling, or simply offering new features or services—you can reduce the likelihood of them canceling their subscription. At the end of the day, customers are either growing with you or away from you. Identifying trends in what your collective customer base asks for the most is a surefire way to keep your customers growing with you. Customers who feel like they're getting more bang for their buck are less likely to look elsewhere for a similar product or service staving off painful losses to competition.  

6. Provide the level of service you’d expect as a customer.

One of the best ways to prevent customers from churning is to provide them with the level of customer service you’d expect as a customer. If your customers feel like you're listening to their concerns, issues, and suggestions and that there is some actionable output, they’ll be less likely to look to a competing product that can provide them with what they need. The root of excellent customer service starts with simply listening and taking the next best action. Adopt the mantra of listening, acting, and improving. 

7. Seek to develop advocates, not just keep customers. 

Customer-obsessed companies don’t just service customers, their goal is to create advocates. Customer advocates are the ultimate customers. They serve as references and speak at industry events and webinars. They provide success stories, product reviews, and quotes for your marketing team. Developing advocates is about putting your customer first, and putting your customer first starts with listening at scale. It’s high time to start using all the feedback your customers give you daily to better understand their wants, needs, and issues so you and your teams can take the necessary action.  

For most B2B SaaS companies, customer churn is what we call the CODB — the cost of doing business. But the fact of the matter is that churn is a “rearview mirror” metric. Traditional telemetry-based reports and customer health scorecards capture what’s happened in the past, and most of the time, if you’re dealing with churn, you’re already too late. With CIPs, like Sturdy, you have valuable insights at your fingertips to look forward through the “windshield” and to see around the corners along the way. This allows you to detect and combat churn before it happens. It’s like a lead-gen for building more durable, profitable relationships. 

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Software

STURDY.AI ANNOUNCES $6M SEED ROUND

Joel Passen
April 1, 2025
5 min read

Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.

Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.

Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue

With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.

“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”

Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection

The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.

“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”

“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”

About Voyager

Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary. 

About Fortson VC

Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.  Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage.  While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.

About Grotech Ventures

Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.

About Sturdy

Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.

For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy now integrates with Jira

Joel Passen
March 10, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever to turn customer feedback into action while saving businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. With Sturdy’s new Jira Connect, any AI-powered Signal in Sturdy can be automatically logged in Jira—helping teams capture, prioritize, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Sturdy for Jira is a Game Changer

Every team needs to know more about their customers. 

Turn customer feedback into valuable Jira content automatically. Sturdy’s AI accurately detects feature requests, bug reports, and other critical product feedback. Customizable agents then deliver this context-rich intelligence to a configurable staging area in Jira with all relevant user and account details, such as segment, ARR, and more. The content is objectively summarized automatically. From there, assigning it to an epic, task, sprint, or release is just one click.

Productivity Gains that Move the Needle

Businesses are unknowingly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on something as simple as manually logging Jira issues. A single customer-facing rep wastes nearly 87 hours annually on repetitive data entry—scaling up to a staggering $354,200 per year for a team of 100 reps. By integrating Sturdy’s AI-driven automation, businesses can reclaim thousands of hours, improve productivity, and reinvest those savings into growth and innovation—all while ensuring more accurate, real-time data flows into Jira effortlessly.

Align product teams with customer reality.

By centralizing AI-powered insights in Jira, Sturdy ensures that product and engineering teams get a complete, objective picture of what’s working, what’s broken, and what needs to be built—without relying on anecdotal feedback. Customer-reported issues appear in Jira moments after they happen, ensuring your product and engineering teams stay ahead of emerging trends and critical bugs—without the lag of traditional reporting.

Effortless setup, immediate impact.

Sturdy’s turnkey integration takes minutes to configure. Once connected, your team gains instant access to context-rich, structured feedback—helping you make faster, data-driven decisions that improve customer satisfaction.

Want to get started? Click the 'Schedule Demo' button at the top of the page.

Integrations

Product Update! Sturdy Now Analyzes Customer Slack Channels

Joel Passen
March 3, 2025
5 min read

We’re making it easier than ever for teams to tap into the power of customer conversations. With this integration, Sturdy’s AI-driven insights—trained to spot key behaviors and trends unique to your business—are now right where your team works. That means more proactive decisions, better collaboration, and a serious productivity boost.

Here’s how Sturdy works with Slack.

  • Get the right insights, right in Slack. Sturdy delivers AI-powered Signals where your team already works, flagging risks, expansion opportunities, and other key moments in real-time. No more digging through conversations—just actionable insights when you need them.

  • Stay on top of every conversation. If your team works asynchronously in Slack channels, it’s easy for important feedback to get lost. Sturdy keeps you ahead by surfacing critical insights before they slip through the cracks.

  • Act fast, not after the fact. Whether it’s a service risk, a feature request, or a potential upsell, Sturdy helps teams spot and respond to what matters—without disrupting their workflow.

Seamless sync with your tools. Sturdy doesn’t just stop at Slack. Insights discovered in customer Slack channels automatically flow into Jira, CSPs, CRMs, and other systems, ensuring the right teams get the right info—without extra work.

How many customers will you have to lose before you try Sturdy?

Schedule Demo
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