1. Drive Early Value Through One Action
The most effective retention move we made was pushing users to experience value early instead of trying to upsell them. We saw churn was highest among users who hadn't completed anything meaningful in their first week. So we rebuilt onboarding around one action, completing a timed practice session and reviewing mistakes. We removed tours and dashboards and focused on that single proof point.
When users completed that step, retention improved sharply. Looking at canceled accounts, more than half had never finished a session. After this change, monthly churn dropped by about 20 percent, and expansion improved because users understood the value sooner. Retention didn't improve because of more emails. It improved because users saw a quick win and committed.
Lin Meyer, CEO, Crucial Exams
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Start here!2. Offer Free Priority Support Hours
One thing that helped us reduce churn for our MedManage portal was providing free priority customer support hours to new customers and annual subscribers, which they could use for enhancements and customizations. This helped us identify key features that our customers wanted, while establishing a closer relationship with them at the start of their service.
We initially offered this as a promotion but have now made it standard practice for all our customers. The key result for us was more revenue, as it improved our sales process, reduced churn, and customers who utilized those free support hours became more likely to use paid support hours when their free hours ran out.
Simon Greenberg, Product Manager, Medidex, Inc.
3. Anchor Success On Core Habit
By connecting product usage back to one main, explicit, unchangeable habit, we were able to affect the most change in account churn. A strong correlation could be drawn between the type of "sticky" account and how frequently the account leverages that one key workflow. The redesign of onboarding and account success check-ins was based on that single workflow as opposed to simply broad feature exposure.
By tracking our customers on a weekly basis and providing visibility, it created fewer "set it and forget it" accounts, along with an observable reduction in early churn of approximately 20 to 30 percent within the first couple of months. Customers who saw ongoing value became increasingly retained rather than relying solely on initial activation wins.
Adam Scuglia, Manager, Business Development, Cortex DM