My SaaS HelpKit recently had a few sub-2% churn months and I thought it's a great opportunity to share what's working.
Our 12-month average monthly churn rate is currently around ~2.5%. This means that if your business has 100 customers at the start of a month, approximately 2 to 3 of them would leave by the end of that month.
Given that Rob Walling considers churn around and below 2% really good for SaaS, I'm pretty proud of hitting this milestone.
In case you don’t know I’m Dom, founder of HelpKit - a SaaS that turns Notion pages into professional help centers. Been at this for 4 years now.
HelpKit has a 3.6-year average customer lifetime. We literally have customers from our early days still with us, which is… amazing.
After my recent post on X about this got some traction, I reflected on what's actually driving our retention and I came up with the three key factors.
I hope it provides you with some value for your own business.
Unfortunately, there's no simple one-rule answer to lowering your churn.
If you ask me, there are three key ingredients to keeping churn low. There's many more but I want to focus on these three.
While you can influence the first and last one, the second one is dictated by the market you're operating in.
Let's get into it.
1) ✹ Empathic & Personal Customer Support
The first and most important component is customer support. I'm obviously heavily biased here, but I can't stress enough how much of a difference it makes.
Up until today, 4 years in, I still personally answer every support ticket that comes in.
I take time for each response, add a personal touch, and just speak to my customers on a more personal level.
Here's what I mean by personal
There's no:
"Dear Mr. Matt Doyle, Our team at HelpKit is sincerely sorry for the bug with the sync button - I have already escalated this to the corresponding engineer and we will take care of this in a matter of 2-3 business days."
Instead, it's:
"Hi Matt, I'm really sorry for what happened there. I can empathize with how frustrating it must have been when you tried to sync but it didn't work. We've already applied a fix and it should be live after a refresh. If you still have any issues or feedback just ping me here - always happy to help!"
The difference? One sounds like it came from a support template.
The other sounds like it came from a human who actually cares about solving your problem.
Regardless if it’s you, the founder, answering or one of your customer support staff you can always add a human touch to your support.
→ Here's the thing: I'm all for automating your customer support as best as possible (heck, I'm literally working on help center software which is now also powered by an AI chatbot).
In a perfect world, your knowledge base should answer every customer support question before they even reach out to you directly.
Definitely spend the bulk of your customer support effort on fixing any potential leakages here.
HelpKit does a lot of things out of the box:
- Beautiful and easy-to-navigate UI/UX
- An embeddable widget that shows users a help article in context right when they experience a problem
- Full-text search + AI-trained chatbot on the entire knowledge base
- Auto-suggests articles when users start typing in the subject input of a contact form request
- Analytics insights on the backend that help understand where your help center might need improvement
Here's the big HOWEVER.
Despite having all those automations in place, in my personal opinion you should do everything in your power to make the interactions with customers that do end up in your ticket inbox as personal as possible.
There's nothing worse than talking to a chatbot with no option to escalate to a human, or even worse, writing emails with support staff only to find out it's AI and absolutely useless.
You'll be surprised by how easily you can also de-escalate pissed-off customers by just being a human on the other side and showing empathy.
You can literally turn a furious paying customer into a product advocate if done right. And I think I'm proud to say that at HelpKit, I seem to be doing a really good job at this.
So go ahead, automate your customer support to receive as few support tickets as possible (while your customers are happy because they found a solution already), but if they slip through to your support tickets → be a human.
Now let's talk about a few other things that obviously play a big role here.
2) ✹ Your Product's Niche
Friction plays a huge role in churn.
Setting up a help center for your company is not an overnight task. It's also not a one-person job.
Most of the time it takes a coordinated effort from an entire team to set up and maintain. That means it's quite hard to really get your foot in the door, but once you're in, you're in.
If you don't catastrophically mess it up, people will tend to stay as it takes quite a while to switch again.
Some products are not of that nature so churn might be much more by default and it takes more effort to keep it down.
3) ✹ Building a Great Product
Now this leads into the last thing, which sounds the most obvious but is worth mentioning:
You need to build a great product.
Your UX/UI must be understandable, it should look and feel modern, and it should have barely any bugs that make people rip their hair out.
Look, I'm not saying this approach will work for every business out there.
But for HelpKit, focusing on these three things has been the difference between a sustainable business and just another failed SaaS experiment.
The irony isn't lost on me that I'm building software to help companies automate their customer support while preaching about staying human.
But that's exactly the point.
Use technology to handle the easy stuff so you can be present for the moments that actually matter.
