Among the most critical concerns facing product and support leaders at subscriber based service providers—such as Email Service Providers (ESP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Marketing Automation companies—is the cost of churn. The subscriber based service market is competitive,  to say the least, and taking proactive steps to defend against subscriber churn is essential to your company’s growth, long-term stability, and competitiveness.

Here are 3 steps you can take now to combat subscriber churn:

1) Enable your users to succeed right away

The fact is a large number of people unsubscribe from your service because no clear pathway has been established for their immediate success using  your application. You can create that pathway very easily by adding Contextual Help to your product. It allows your developers to easily add a fully integrated help system to your application. This modern F1-style help system creates a rich social help experience for your users by giving them contextually relevant help information right inside your product. Customers don’t have to exit the application to search for the answers they need because they are only one click away.

2) Gain insight into your user’s sense of product and support satisfaction

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. By implementing a socially powered product help site you’ll gain valuable, actionable metrics.  You’ll be able to analyze your documentation by quality, aging and customer search behavior in aggregate or by specific topics. What are your unique selling propositions? Have you covered these topics with quality and currency? Are these discoverable? Now you’ll know. With the right curation and behavioral analytics you’ll be given real-time insight.

3) Improve the value of your service for already active users

Chances are that most users don’t fully understand or take full advantage of your product, and often look to competitors for features and capabilities that already exist in your services but remain undiscovered or not fully understood. By leveraging your product documentation and knowledgebase assets into a highly engaging, user friendly social help center, you’ll answer your users’ queries with highly relevant information about your product and its features that’s easy to access, navigate and understand. Furthermore, users are presented with relevant collateral information from your documentation and knowledgebase which enhances user expertise and showcases features and product capabilities that otherwise go undiscovered in static help environments.

By taking these three steps right now, you can reduce subscriber churn by as much as 67%, increase user adoption and product advocacy in the workplace and social marketplace, reduce user support outreach by as much as 53% (along with associated costs), and increase sales of up-sells, add-ons, and collateral services by as much as 48%.*

*Based upon a survey of subscriber based service companies currently using MindTouch with MindTouch F1 Contextual Help.