Ultimately, improving your NRR lies with developing expansion and reducing churn. By boosting your customer base by upselling and adding on features at a higher rate than downgrades and cancellations, you’ll see a positive NRR.

Expansion

By building up your promotional expansion efforts, you can convince current customers that they should upgrade their service to meet their needs. To increase expansion, you can:

• Use pop-ups (modals) to notify users of upgrade features that could benefit them, like when a customer uses their one free content credit that needs an upgrade for access to multiple credits.

• Allocate resources to products or services that bring in the most revenue.

• Use contextual in-app messaging to upsell users on features they lack, like “upgrade to see more messages” in an app that only allows you to read the last 500 messages.

• Offer customer discounts to use your service, like a 15% off coupon for the first three months of upgraded service.

• Use prompt upgrades to remind users of the features they’re missing out on which give them extra value, like a 7-day free trial giving access to all features on the platform.

Using Planhat as a tool to track and manage your expansion, you can:

• Benchmark customer usage of your products.

• Visualize how engagement of your product varies and be informed if it does.

• Share with customers so they understand the value they’re receiving.

• Use a CRM pipeline tool for your Account Executives to focus on selling.

Reducing Churn

Reducing churn is all about understanding users and why they are leaving your service. What can you do to encourage them to stay? What adjustments to your product would you need to make? Having that data will allow you to implement changes in the future to retain customers.

• Use an in-app self-service help to guide users to answers to their questions, like a “Need help?” button on the bottom of the screen.

• Have a good Customer Success team that listens to your users and communicates any issues with the team.

• Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to understand customer loyalty, like how likely they are to recommend your product to another potential user.

• Consider a holistic view of your organization's structure and allocate tasks to teams and officers that make sense.

• Use churn surveys at the end of their cancellation process to understand why they are leaving, like a “Sorry to see you go. Tell us why.” screen.

• Ensure you have the right customers for your product or service. The more customers you have that don’t fit the ideal customer, the more likely they are to cancel their service.