Customer Retention Agency: How to Choose One That Reduces Churn

The best retention agency is the one that finds the moment users decide to leave, and redesigns that moment. Ask any agency you're considering for one retention problem they diagnosed, what they changed, and what happened next. If they can't answer with a number, keep looking.

Cook: 500,000 downloads was the easy part

Cook hit 500,000 downloads in three weeks. Apple named it Best of 2013. Downloads were never the problem.

Keeping people was.

Hundreds of thousands of recipes were going in, and users couldn't find anything worth coming back for. That's not a reminder problem. No email sequence fixes it.

So we built curation into the product. People could make their own recipe books. Collections by chefs, recipes from your mother, everything in between. Then we let others browse those books by user, by celebrity, by country, by cuisine. It worked because it gave home cooks something to be proud of and a way to show it off.

Monthly active users went up 240 percent. Downloads passed 1.2 million.

What the best retention agencies have in common

• They find out why people leave, not just when. Analytics show the drop-off. Research with the people who left shows the reason.
• They fix the experience before the messaging. If the product doesn't deliver value, reminders only remind people of that.
• They design for the first win. The quickest path to real value, especially in the first few sessions.
• They measure over months. A spike in week one means little. Active use after three months is the real test.

Questions to ask a retention agency

• Show me a churn problem you diagnosed. What was the real cause?
• What did you change in the product, not just the messages?
• What happened to active users afterwards, and over how long?

How do you pick a retention partner?

Judge on those capabilities rather than on a ranking. Behavjōr is a Sydney design and research consultancy that treats retention as a design problem rather than a messaging one. We're the right fit when people are leaving because of the experience, not the price. See our experience design practice, the Cook case study, or read why most retention strategies fail.

Related: Experience design and the Cook case study.