NAB Show 2017: Reducing Churn and Retaining Customers

With NAB Show 2017 taking place in Las Vegas this month, we are seeing more companies across the TV and OTT industry focusing on how they can improve services and ultimately retain customers.

It is critical to hold on to customers, especially considering that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. TV and OTT companies across the market have taken note and are thus striving to reduce the number of customers churning.

Reduce Involuntary Churn

By leveraging retention and recovery tools, content owners can be proactive in their approach to churn. These companies can minimize involuntary churn by updating credit card details in advance of subscription renewals and can use technology to understand the most successful retry sequences to implement.

TV and OTT organizations have access to a range of configurable features which minimize involuntary churn and boost existing customer and subscriber revenues, including:

• Card expiry date validation: this validates the expiry date following a successful renewal.
• Automatic account updating: ensures the most current card information is on the account and used during authorization attempts, preventing involuntary churn and optimizing customer lifetime value.
• Retry rules and suppression windows: data scientists can set up accurate suppression windows and configurable multi-layered time-based retry rules that are most likely to yield an approval.

Where this eSuite functionality has been leveraged, studies have shown a reduction in involuntary churn by between 4-6%.

Personalized Targeting

With insight into customer engagement, purchasing habits and behavioral trends, operators, broadcasters and OTT services have access to a whole host of valuable information. By leveraging historical data along with machine learning, organizations can now understand at which stage of the customer journey a subscriber purchased, their level of engagement with their subscription and video content, and along other factors that contribute to voluntary churn.

This is where predictive churn functionality comes in to play. Using historical data to predict when a paying subscriber is likely to churn enables organizations to react quickly and automatically target them with:

• Retention Offers: Prevent an at risk customer from churning with a temporary reduced price to keep them using the service e.g. the next 3 months at 50% off.
• Tailored Package: Similarly, if you know a customer is not using the entire package, create a personalized bundle based on their viewing habits offered at a reduced cost, to keep them as a customer.
• Reward Long-time Subscribers: Make sure your loyal subscribers don’t even think about leaving by offering rewards or a loyalty program.

Attending NAB Show 2017?

The importance of churn can never be overlooked and organizations across the OTT and entertainment industry need to ensure they have tactics and technology in place to combat and reduce churn figures.

Meet our OTT and subscription specialists at NAB Show 2017 to find out how you can grow customer engagement, conversion and retention.