Top 5 tools to reduce customer churn in 2024

Use our list of the best churn management software to pick the tools that'll help you better understand user behavior, engage your customers, maximize retention, and reduce churn.

5 churn management platforms to boost customer retention, loyalty

Different types of churn management software help you achieve distinct goals, like:

• Predicting and preventing customer churn

• Getting deeper insights into why your users churn

• Engaging your customers

• Addressing churn at every step of the customer journey

• Managing subscriptions to improve customer retention

These tools analyze your customers' behavior to predict when they might be at risk of churn—so you can take the necessary steps to address whatever challenges or frustrations they may be facing. For example, one tool categorizes your customers into different levels of churn risk, while another helps you reach out to them to prevent them from leaving. 

Adding churn management platforms to your tech stack gives you crucial insights into the way your users view and interact with your product, so you know how to improve the experience to enhance customer satisfaction and retention. 

Let’s take a look at five distinct churn management tools to help you delight your users and make them stick with your product:

1. Qualtrics CustomerXM for churn prediction and prevention

Predicting where and when churn is most likely to happen is one of the best ways to reduce it. Qualtrics CustomerXM helps you lower churn by providing insight into how users feel about and interact with your product. 

Use Qualtrics to distribute surveys to customers via various channels, so you can collect valuable feedback and engage users. Its Predict IQ™ technology identifies customers and accounts likely to churn and tells you what drives that behavior, giving you key insights you'd otherwise have to spend weeks gathering manually. 

The tool’s role-based dashboard presents targeted information to different teams, so they can take the right steps to prevent churn in high-risk users. 

This means your customer success team doesn’t just see sales data, and product teams don’t get caught up in marketing metrics. Each team gets a segmented view that makes data more digestible and actionable—so everyone knows what they need to do to delight users and prevent churn.

How Qualtrics CustomerXM helps you reduce churn: 

• Easily view and interpret your data with a role-based analytics dashboard

• Get churn probability and prediction metrics

• Distribute surveys through email, chatbots, SMS messages, and apps

• Automatically identify users at risk of churning with the 'Predict IQ™' feature

• Seamlessly create tickets for closed-loop follow-ups

2. Hotjar to see customer behavior in action and understand reasons for churn

Once you find out where and when your customers are churning, you need to understand the ‘why’. This is where Hotjar (that's us👋), a product experience (PX) insights tool, can help. Hotjar collects qualitative and quantitative data about users’ behavior and opinions, so you can pinpoint what’s frustrating them. 

Hotjar’s Observe tools—Heatmaps and Recordings—give you a firsthand look at how your users experience your product. For example, Hotjar's Recordings tool shows you playbacks of user sessions, so you can identify actions, like rage clicks, and elements that irritate your customers and make them stop using your website or service. 

Hotjar’s Ask tools (Feedback and Surveys) let you speak directly with your customers about their experience with your product and brand. For example, you can embed a discreet feedback widget on your website that allows users to share their frustrations in the moment. Hotjar also lets you send out surveys to targeted user groups to get their honest views on how you can improve your product and the user experience (UX). 

For example, if you’re a B2B business trying to understand why long-time customers are leaving all of a sudden, use Hotjar’s B2B churn survey template to ask the right questions and learn what changes you need to make to improve your product or service.

How Hotjar helps you reduce churn:

• Get qualitative and quantitative insights into the customer experience

• Heatmaps and Recordings to get a firsthand view of user behavior

• Feedback widget and Surveys to gather insights directly from your users

• A comprehensive Dashboard to get a clear overview of all your data

• A 'Highlights' feature to easily sort and share key insights across teams and with stakeholders

• An extensive list of integrations, including thousands of connections via Zapier

3. Zendesk to engage and support your customers

Zendesk is a comprehensive customer service solution that makes it easy for customers to reach you when they need assistance. While not specifically a churn management platform, Zendesk helps you boost user engagement and increase the stickiness of your product. 

According to Zendesk, 61% of customers report they would switch to a competitor after just one bad customer service experience. That’s why investing in customer support software drives down churn and has a positive impact on retention. 

Zendesk lets you conveniently offer conversational support to customers via various channels, and build a help center and community forum to anticipate your users’ most common questions—using AI to speed up response time and take the pressure off your customer success team. 

So, if you’re an ecommerce platform that’s noticed customers turning to competitors due to dissatisfaction with your customer service, using Zendesk to streamline your customer success efforts is an ideal way to reduce churn.

How Zendesk helps you reduce customer churn:

• Multi-channel customer support chats that always stay connected

• Help center and community forum creation capabilities

• AI support to speed up response time and take pressure off your staff

• 'Unified Agent Workspace' to stay on top of customer complaints and inquiries

• Comprehensive analytics and reporting feature

4. ChurnZero to fight churn at every step of the customer journey

ChurnZero describes itself as a 'holistic customer success management platform', and it helps you detect and prevent churn at every stage in your customer’s journey—through tailored solutions for user onboarding, product adoption, and subscription renewals and upgrades.

The platform lets you integrate data related to just about every user touchpoint, starting from sales and going all the way to customer support. ChurnZero then uses this data to generate a 'churn score', which gives you a clear look at your customers' health, or how satisfied and engaged they are with your product experience.

It also notifies you when customer activation milestones occur, so you can keep track of the events when churn occurs. At the same time, the Command Center gives you a convenient overview of key information and pending tasks. 

For example, ChurnZero can help your software company fight SaaS churn because it’s designed to address the unique challenges presented by each stage in the SaaS customer lifecycle, from onboarding to feature adoption and subscription renewal.

How ChurnZero helps you reduce customer churn:

• Clear and comprehensive data reporting in the Command Center

• 'ChurnScores' to identify the health of all your customers

• Customer journey overviews and detailed account insights

• Real-time alerts for churn and customer activation events

• Numerous native integrations to import customer and product data 

5. SubscriptionFlow to manage subscriptions and maximize retention

SubscriptionFlow helps SaaS businesses, subscription-based ecommerce companies—and anyone who sells their product or service on a subscription-based model—keep track of and reduce customer churn. The tool's features, like automated recurring billing and payment processing, make it easy for your customers to renew their plans rather than cancel subscriptions. 

The tool also tracks subscription analytics and customer retention metrics to give you a clear view of the health of your customers and company. While SubscriptionFlow's CRM makes it easy to track customer behavior and activity, the customizable customer service portal empowers you to better serve your users. 

SubscriptionFlow also comes with features that help you map out customer journeys, perform user segmentation, and set up churn signals, so you can better understand your customers, their lifecycle, and when they’re at risk of churning. 

If you have a SaaS business, use the platform’s predictive analytics to receive alerts about customers that are likely to churn, so you can take the actions necessary to retain them, like increasing engagement or offering a special discount.

How SubscriptionFlow helps you reduce churn: 

• Subscription management with recurring billing and payment processing

• Powerful and customizable CRM

• Customer Health Score tracking and analytics

• Real-time alerts to help you proactively prevent churn

• Retention management and account expansion capabilities

How to pick the right churn management software

Deciding on a churn management software that's right for you will depend on your specific business and customer needs, challenges, and the nature of your product or service.

Before selecting which tools to add to your tech stack, it’s also important to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative churn software. Quantitative tools provide you with detailed metrics about customer churn, while qualitative software helps you understand the ‘why’ behind churn.

Pick a tool (or a variety of tools) that gives you both quantitative and qualitative insights, so you can identify which customers are likely to leave, and which aspects of the user experience you can improve to reduce churn in the long run.

Use churn management software for happier, stickier customers

Happy users are loyal users, so giving your customers a seamless experience that exceeds expectations is the best way to make them stick around.

When you pay attention to key insights like customer behavior and user engagement metrics, you get a clearer understanding of how your users experience your product and service.

Use one (or a combination) of the tools above to identify exactly which steps you need to take to keep your customers satisfied and engaged.