How to reduce customer churn through network visibility?

Customer churn imposes a heavy cost on businesses. Not only is it expensive to acquire new customers, but word of mouth from satisfied customers can also be the best source of revenue. A satisfied customer base can spread the word about products and services and provide a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, customer dissatisfaction with the user experience or application performance is the main reason they switch vendors.

According to 451 Research's latest "Voice of the Connected User" survey, 76% of customers are likely to cancel a service or switch to another provider if an app or service performs poorly. On the other hand, satisfied customers have financial benefits; they are more likely to add additional services or upgrade, and 43% of customers will pay more for greater convenience of a product.

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One of the main ways enterprises can reduce customer churn is by increasing IT teams’ visibility into the network so they can monitor the performance of the underlying layers and address potential issues before they impact the user experience.

This visibility is critical because there are a number of trends that make it difficult for IT departments to maintain high levels of application performance and end-user experience. These trends include increasing 24x7x365 connectivity, low latency and low jitter bandwidth, and the acceleration around bring your own device (BYOD), software as a service (SaaS) applications, remote work (especially since the outbreak), and shadow IT.

Additionally, the operating environments that IT supports are increasingly driven by application developers and non-technical business leaders who rarely consider IT's need to manage and monitor the environment when making decisions. In fact, the pandemic recovery and shift to working from home have put additional pressure on IT to support high levels of application performance from outside the corporate network (i.e., the same perspective that customers have). All of this means that application or network downtime is more expensive than ever, and ensuring consistent access to mission-critical applications and a good end-user experience is critical to customer loyalty and employee productivity.

Better visibility into network performance can reduce user churn in two ways. First, it allows IT to see what the user experience is really like without having to rely on trouble tickets. This allows IT to anticipate problems and resolve them proactively, rather than waiting until users complain. Second, better network visibility can reduce mean time to resolution by speeding up network troubleshooting or quickly proving that it’s not a network issue and can be passed on to the appropriate team.

Network issues that can affect application performance and cause churn include:

• Network configuration errors can cause delays and jitter in video calls.
• Network traffic forwarding and routing issues, as well as suboptimal routing (such as routing traffic across continents), lead to slower application response times.
• Congestion at VPN gateways can significantly affect overall network performance.

When network administrators are equipped with the right metrics, they have the end-to-end insight and network visibility they need to optimize network performance and prevent or resolve these issues. Key metrics for IT to understand the user experience include latency, jitter, web page load time, application, network and server response time, and mean resolution time. Monitoring more specific network metrics will also help IT departments quickly identify and resolve potential user experience issues. For example, IT departments should measure link utilization to understand when a specific router becomes more congested. TCP retransmissions are another good indicator of network health - an increase in this metric will negatively affect application performance.

To track these metrics, IT departments need access to data from several different sources. The network is a major part of this; IT organizations should have access to network metadata and packet data for the physical, virtual, and cloud-native elements of the network deployed in data centers, branch offices, and multi-cloud environments. Instrumenting the network to obtain this data requires a mix of physical and virtual network probes, packet brokers, and capture devices to collect and consolidate data from all corners of the network. Network packet and flow data is extremely helpful for monitoring the user experience and is simply not available any other way. Data from other sources, such as end-user monitoring using proxies or custom browser code, can also be very useful in determining the actual user experience.

IT departments need to manage and maintain consistency across a broad hybrid environment to deliver a high-quality user experience that reduces customer churn. Beating this chaos is a difficult but solvable problem. By instrumenting the network including physical, virtual, and cloud-native elements, combined with other data sources as described above, IT teams will have the information they need to maintain high-quality access to mission-critical applications, creating a positive end-user experience and ensuring lifetime value.