Welcome to another week of Burn the Churn! This week, we’re continuing to work on the core by exploring how community allows your customers to engage with your product and your brand on their own terms. The result? A stronger, healthier relationship and less churn. Let’s go! (Not signed up for the challenge yet? Join here.)

Last week, we talked about data. And if we were to choose one metric category to focus on, it would be engagement.

Because when it comes to communities, engagement is king. And that engage­ment, whether it’s a question in the community, a search in the knowledge base, or a feature request, is one of the best ways to understand customer health.

So, how exactly can a community help you reduce churn?

Let’s take a look.

1. Driving engagement

Engagement is the beating pulse of communities. Whether a customer is exploring onboarding content, joining discussions, searching for help content, answering questions, or providing product feedback – engagement is a good thing. Because an engaged customer is a customer that shows up. They’re there to do the work, they’re willing, but perhaps not always able – that’s where the peer-to-peer aspect comes into play.

Let’s be honest here. Sometimes our customers have better practices, hacks, and creative solutions for our products than we do. That’s why a community where free-flowing knowledge exchange between customers is invaluable. Whether it’s about sharing those best practices, helping them solve a problem, or simply pointing them to the right content, peer-to-peer engagement is what makes communities thrive. If you don’t always have the best or right answers at hand, we can guarantee you, someone in the community does.

Another great thing about communities? They never close.

So how exactly do you create a successful community where your customers are engaged? Learn more from Mixpanel.

2. Creating autonomy

This is the age of the autonomous customer. They want to do things in their own time and – on their own terms. The solution? Self-service.

Self-service simply means to offer your customers the means to be successful with your product or service on their own. It’s like putting together your own fitness program, with guidance from your PT and support from your peers.

Sure, there’s a time and place for white-glove treatment, but if you facilitate autonomy, you’re very likely to see:

• Increased engagement
• Faster product adoption
• Reduced churn

With more autonomous customers, your CSMs will be able to focus on proactive tasks and design success plans that give customers even more control over their experience while reducing time to value.

Learn more from Pipefy.

3. Having a say

The voice of the customer is more important than ever. Customers want to feel heard and they want to have a say in the development of the product they’re paying for. A community provides them with the platform to do just that. It’s their direct line to Product Managers and influencing the roadmap.

What does this mean for your teams? Your CSMs and Product Managers won’t have to invest time and resources into collecting enough feedback to arrive at meaningful insights. Instead, that feedback (and plenty of it) will be provided organically in the community. 

When your customers are actively involved in the process, they’ll be more likely to try new features when you release them. Ultimately, you’re creating a more sticky product by allowing your customers to build the product alongside you.

And what does a more sticky product mean? Less churn.

Learn more from Gainsight.

More insights, less churn

Customer engagement has a direct correlation to churn. The higher the engagement, the less churn, and vice versa. But just because you’re implementing a community, doesn’t necessarily mean increased engagement and less churn. The goal of your community, just like that of your product, is to provide ongoing and continuous value to your customers. And that requires work.

But once you’ve made community a part of your growth and retention strategy, you’ll be able to better understand customer needs, have a more informed view on customer health, and ultimately, you’ll be able to leverage that knowledge to reduce churn.

Ready to burn the churn with community?
Talk to our team and discover how you can build healthy and lasting customer relationships through community. 

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By Jo Johansson

Head of Content at inSided. Passionate about content ops, words and horses.