In this solo episode of the Key Customer Growth Podcast, host Jermaine Edwards explores the phenomenon of customer churn, arguing that traditional definitions miss the nuanced, progressive nature of why customers leave. He introduces a churn cycle model that views churn as the result of a sequence of poor decisions, unmet expectations, and unaddressed experiences over time. Edwards outlines the "3 Ds" of churn triggers—discomfort (unmet expectations causing tension), dissatisfaction (ongoing unmet expectations or violated values), and disconnection (persistent gaps leading to relationship breakdown). He maps these triggers onto three management domains: practical (delivery/value), relational (experience/trust), and emotional (commitment/loyalty). To combat churn, he recommends three strategic shifts: move from asking "What do we do?" to "How do we know?" (focus on measurement and insight), align company promises with evolving customer expectations, and take clear ownership of the customer journey—especially the first 12 months—through intentionally designed interactions that leave customers better off than when they arrived. Throughout, Edwards cites research (e.g., Accenture study of 748 B2B buyers) and urges listeners to become "churn champions" and irreplaceable advisors who continuously deliver value.
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Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an Irreplaceable Advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide, your Your journey starts here. Hey and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast.
This is episode 2 and my name is Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. Today I'd like to share some thoughts with you on one of the most talked about areas in customer management and that is customer churn. We're going to talk about a range of different topics today that I'll walk you through, but let's just answer this question: why talk about churn exactly? We all know it's important. Well, here's why. When we look at the stats and the research, it is really evident that customer satisfaction results aren't going up. In fact, they've plateaued, and in many industries, they are plummeting significantly. I'd like to indicate some research that you could have a look at, at the end of this podcast. And the expectations we hold of our customers just aren't the same. Our customers are changing consistently, and they're expecting a higher quality. That's kind of led me to a question I started asking myself years ago, and that's something I'm really obsessed about, I guess I could say, and that's why do good companies lose great customers? In our research, we've discovered 5 core reasons, and in a separate podcast, I'd like to walk you through all 5 of them to really give time and space to discuss it really well. But one of those pitfalls is the idea of mistaking customer convenience for commitment. And what it means is when a company believes, because a customer hasn't articulated their concerns and are hanging around, that that customer at all times is content and happy. We are mistaking customer convenience, convenience of staying, for commitment to a brand or their service and product. And that's just a fool's game and a very dangerous assumption. And it's a new global research study from Accenture. What they found in a study of 748 B2B buyers is that 44%, 329 approximately, companies had changed vendors in the past 12 months. I'll come back to this research in a moment. Well, what was most shocking in the conversations was 34% of those buyers had not left because of price, not because of some big incident. It was the delivery of unmet service expectations over time, and this is going to be a really important area that I'd like to explore. We know that churn happens. In fact, you may be experiencing right now. I've experienced it, and in all the frustration and disappointment it has, you know, we can view it as all those years invested, and it can feel really tough. We look at those relationships that we've poured into and projects alike, but we have to first take a step back and not to think about necessarily the customer to begin with, as in why they left us, but why we have customers leave in the first place. We need to understand the nature of churn and how it actually works within the relationships that we have with customers. So there are many ways we can describe churn, and I think it's really important for us to have a clear definition. Now, one way to describe it, I've seen this in the kind of dictionary version or the Wikipedia version, is the kind of proportion portion of contractual customers or subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time. So essentially the number of people, number of customers that leave a supplier during a period of time. Now that could be helpful to some degree, but actually still doesn't give us a real view on what churn is, what's happening really with churn. But another way we can describe churn is as the number of customers who leave reduce their current spend, or purchase a like product from a competitor over a specific period of time. Now we get some more interesting data here that churn is not just about this full context of customer leaving, but actually churn is chipping away in specific areas. It's the time when a customer purchases something else from a customer that isn't you, or from a competitor, when they Reduce their current spend with you in a particular area. All these things culminate into behaviors that we can see that indicate churn triggers, particular things that are taking place that allow us to view the relationship differently and take proactive steps. And so if we look at this, we can begin to go a little bit further into our business and explore what's taking place. So there's a churn cycle that's happening. And the churn cycle tends to be the consequence of a sequence of really poor customer decisions, assumptions, experiences, and strategies we make over time that have not been addressed adequately or have been challenged in the moment. Now, I'll say that again. The churn cycle happens, and it tends to be the consequence of a sequence of really poor customer decisions, customer assumptions, experiences, and strategies made over time that were not addressed adequately or challenged in the moment. Meaning that most decisions for a customer to leave outright is not something that happens in a single moment. It's a sequence of things that are taking place. That move over time, that move them into a position where now they're making a decision to leave. Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen quickly, but in the grand scale of things, it usually happens over time. So how do we take that information and use it to our advantage? Well, one way we can think about this is understanding what control we actually have to influencing these specific areas, influencing churn and this churn cycle. We first have to understand what the churn cycle is, and then how we manage those specific areas. Well, as we looked at this, we came up with 3 specific Ds, the 3 Ds of churn. The first is discomfort, dissatisfaction, and disconnection. And so discomfort is simply an unmet expectation. Where the clarity of something has not been articulated well, and now there's miscommunication taking place. There's discomfort. There's an unwarranted tension between you and the customer. That's discomfort, and those things could be dealt with fairly quickly if you're aware of those and making sure that you're communicating and clarifying things with your customer. Then we have dissatisfaction. Which can be unmet expectations over a period of time, which leads to a dissatisfaction score, or it can also be a violated value that takes place. Sometimes they attach a particular moral value to you and you've broken that moral value. That can lead to dissatisfaction and sometimes into disconnection, meaning a complete disconnection of the relationship. Now, disconnection is both time, expectation, and values. It's the consistency of that over time. When those things have not been addressed to the quality and standards of the actual person, to the quality and standards of the other person, and that's disconnection. And so we can actually look at these things at a much more granular level for each of our businesses. Where are the expectations that we hold with the customer early in our relationship? Where are the places that we've triggered disatisfaction. Where are those places where if unmet, we can have this disconnection? We can actually look at those practically within our business. So if those are the triggers— discomfort, dissatisfaction, and disconnection— what is the management area that we can apply? Well, those management areas exist for all businesses. It's practical management of customer delivery and value, what you're actually producing and doing for the customer. It's relational management, of the experience and trust with the contacts that you communicate with. And then there's the emotional management of the customer commitment and the risk associated in that relationship as well, which really impacts loyalty. So we have those three areas. We have the churn triggers of discomfort, dissatisfaction, and disconnection. And we have these management areas, the churn cycle management of practical management, relational management, and emotional management. And all of this you can actually find written up in a really nice blog that I have, that you'll get a link to this in the show notes. So now that we have this, we understand what churn is, that when we look at it, it actually happens because it's a consequence of a sequence of really poor customer decisions, assumptions, and experiences, strategies made over time, that have not been adequately addressed or challenged in the moment. We know that's what's happening. We know that churn isn't just the outcome of what a customer does at the end of a year or months, meaning how they leave or the decision to leave. It's actually happening way before that. It's when they reduce their revenue with you, when they go and buy from another competitor. All those are triggers that are telling you something about the relationship. So then what do we do with that? How do we move from reactively receiving this information into being proactive? Well, there are 3 things I'd like to raise with you I think might be really important, and then I'd encourage you to go read the blog to go a bit further and deeper with this. So the first is we need to shift from asking, "What do we do?" to "How do we know?" What do we do to how do we know? And essentially, this is asking you and the companies, instead of saying, "Hey, what do we do to keep this company?" If we ask ourselves, "How do we know what we're doing or could do would work? How do we measure that? How do we think about this?" Because we don't— we just don't want to do lots of activity. We want to shift our perspective before our activity. We really want to get into what are we observing? And how do we know those things are accurate? How do we begin to test that? Now, this might require some work on your behalf, and if you're wanting some advice on this, I would be happy to speak, my team and I, on this particular area. But this is a really important piece of work here for your business, shifting from what do we know, or what do we do, I should say, to how do we know. Not just activity, but perspective, insight, observation. How do we know this is working? How do we know? What will we measure in order for us to not be led by assumptions around particular behaviors? That's number one. Shift from asking what do we do to how do we know. The second piece is understanding your, your expectations and those of your customers are rarely the same thing. They are very rarely the same thing. In fact, the promises you make and the promises that your customer wants you to keep are also not the same. So the first thing we need really to do is understand what does your customer actually really value from the relationship? And at the beginning of that relationship, what were their expectations and how has that shifted? That can be a really simple conversation if you have a relationship with the customer, or even if you don't, to begin that conversation to really deepen those relationships. What do you really value from this relationship, if anything? You need to be open to that particular thing coming out, if there's anything that you do value from a relationship. And what was it at the beginning? How has it changed today? So what does the environment look like for you, and, and how has the expectations changed through the change and shift in that environment? What's changed that? We can explore those with our customers. So that's what we need to do. We need to understand that your expectations and those of your customers are rarely the same, and so we need to ask some better questions. The last thing, and one that most really customer-centric, customer-centric or focused organizations will have, is a clear ownership of the customer journey. They'll know along the way those particular places that will have greater friction points, those things that will cause greater uncertainty with the customer during your lifetime with them. And I'd always advocated the first 12 months being completely mapped out for an organization, not just the onboarding process, but actually designing specific kinds of interactions with your customers in mind and your best customers to be more certain with that. So, effective management of churn isn't done by random activities. Effective management of churn is an intentionally designed set of interactions between you and the customer that leaves the customer better than when they arrived. I'll say that once more. Real effective management of churn is not random activity. It is an intentionally designed set of interactions between you and your best customers that leaves them better than when they arrived. And so if you can think about the designing of how you, you think about your engagements with your customers as something that's not just intentional, but it's designed to leave your customers better off than when they arrived, then you would have to think in terms of that. And one of the big things that I talk about is how do you become the advisor your customer never wants to leave? The simple way to do that is to always leave them better than when they arrived with you. If you can give them that experience and impact of relational impact, value, then loyalty will go up immediately. And there's a way in which you can think about this that allows you to do that consistently. And one of those areas is thinking about those daily engagements engagements, thinking about that journey, thinking about the questions that you're asking each other as a team, thinking about the understanding of those expectations, and having a clear view of what it means to your customer. If you can do those things, you're almost guaranteed to transform and change your results, completely reshape and reinforce the right things that you want your customers to experience with and from you. So if you found that really helpful, again, notes are inside the show notes, and there's a blog that gives you more detail around some of these areas. But go out and be a churn champion, somebody who becomes an advisor your customer never wants to leave.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.
