The next challenge: combating abandonment rates
Posted by Brian Wong on Jun 11, 2009, under AerThoughts
As many web applications begin to reach the initial stages of their “maturity”, the next hurdle for those behind these services is controlling the number of people who jump ship.
In the beginning, it was all about getting users. How many can we bring in? It wasn’t about retention. It wasn’t about fostering relationships with “users”. The “user” was and still is a number. There are exceptions.
The future of CRM with web applications is the ability to slow down the abandonment rate of accounts and services. If something is free, the loss of a user doesn’t seem like that much of a loss. But we all know that free users aren’t just leechers. They bring in revenue potential, they provide valuable WOM, and they help polish your service. Combating abandonment isn’t just about ensuring sufficient feedback channels. It means building in feedback mechanisms right into the application that target and detect users that are using certain aspects of your service less and less – monitoring usage behaviour and providing context-based suggestions on how the service can continue to enhance productivity in some way – can be valuable. Some services enjoy sending “nudges”. But without proving your continuous utility, “nudges” become annoying. The key is to “nudge” without irritating.
So how will you keep your users from jumping ship?
