Customer Service
Jul 22, 2024
The journey to driving subscriptions rates isn’t easy. Many B2C businesses with subscription models struggle to convert free trial users. And the numbers back it up; only 2-5% of free trial users convert into paying customers, according to Harvard Business Review.
Overcoming this hurdle requires a deep understanding of customer needs, and it starts with a strong foundation of customer data. There are ways to attract, engage and retain users across every stage of the customer journey, and these ideas are hidden within your customer feedback and support data.
The information that customers share, across social media platforms, review sites, support tickets, and conversation forums contain a wealth of information behind what they love about your product, and where there might be friction points behind making the decision to purchase a license.
Here’s where generative insights, powered by Generative Conversation Intelligence (GenCI), can help. By analyzing interactions and feedback, Generative CI allows subscription-based businesses to gain valuable insights into user behavior and preferences. Generative insights go beyond product analytics data, giving a deeper look into not only what users are saying, but also what types of support complaints they are submitting, enabling business leaders to paint a more cohesive picture behind what users love, what they struggle with, and what is really keeping them from paying for your service.
In this blog, we’ll explore some ways that subscription-based businesses can leverage generative insights and conversation data to convert free trial users into loyal, paying customers.
Table of Contents
Create Tailored Onboarding Experiences
The onboarding process for free trials or freemium user accounts is one of the most critical opportunities to collect data to personalize the user experience.
Think about it: not all customers will have the same needs from the product or service. Think through the key information needed to better understand their needs, such as:
If they’ll be using the service for personal or work
How they found out about it
How they plan on using it
Any specific details about the user’s preferences, sensitivities (beauty industry), allergies (food industry), preferred styles (fashion industry)
By collecting this information before the account is created, businesses have a vast amount of structured data that can then be given to GenCI for analysis of key user trends, themes, and more.
For instance, a meal delivery service could collect key information about the user’s dietary preferences, weekly eating habits, and family size to create personalized meal plans that factor in all of these things.
Instead of leaving an analyst to sift through all of the data, GenCI can surface themes such as the top performing meal plans, specific questions about recipes, and common objections that are surfaced in up-selling or cross-selling efforts. These details can be used to then create different marketing nurture campaigns, enrolling users based on likelihood of conversion and their own verified interests.
One meal delivery service used GenCI to discover that some of their recipes were causing allergies and reactions in their customers. They were able to work quickly to make tweaks to their recipes and replace the triggering ingredients with new ones, rolling them out to customers quickly and in turn preventing potential churn.
Get Full Visibility into Forum Discussions
One of the first steps in converting free trial users is to understand their concerns and issues. A key way to do this is going to the major community forums that users turn to, whether that’s your own forum, Amazon reviews, Discord, Reddit, or any other site where questions are asked and answered.
Most user research, product and marketing teams manually review all of this data to make improvements on user acquisition efforts. Yet this approach is time intensive and it’s impossible to capture every potential insight.
“We have nearly 18,000 active users on our Discord channel, and I have barely scratched the surface on what users are saying about our product.” —VP of Business, AI video production company
Here’s where GenCI can be used to aggregate data from all of the forums where your users talk to each other, getting rich information about top feature mentions, frequent bugs, and UI/UX feedback.
The magic with this technology lies in its use of a multi-LLM pipeline for analysis, which allows it to automatically surface insight into top themes and trends. For example, a genealogy company used GenCI to uncover that a vast majority of free trial users were automatically getting enrolled into paid memberships without previous consent, which was leading to discontent across a large sum of users. While on paper this led to high conversion rates, this also meant the churn rate was even higher. The company then took steps to remedy the situation, which in the short-term lowered conversion rates, but ultimately led to higher retention in the users that did make the decision to pay for their annual membership.
Trigger Automatic Actions to Activate Users
Another way to improve conversions is to make user data actionable. If a customer expresses an interest in learning more about types of services or memberships, for instance, this can be used by marketing to drive conversions (you can get a deep on how this works dive here).
With GenCI, businesses can connect with engagement and customer data platforms to automatically:
Update customer segments
Trigger promotions or discounts
Trigger campaign enrollment
With automatic actions, insights can be integrated into a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to update individual customer profiles. For instance, if a customer frequently asks about a particular product feature, their profile can be tagged to indicate a specific interest in that feature. Using these updated profiles, dynamic audience segments can be created, such as "interested in new products," "requires customer support," or "high purchase intent."
As an example, telecom contact center Centerfield leverages Echo AI’s GenCI to update audiences on Facebook and Google ads, improving their ability to target better fit leads that have a higher likelihood of buying their cable and phone plans.
Looking Ahead: Boost Conversions with Generative Insights
Believe it or not, your customers are telling you what you need to know about them. Whether you have a physical product, an internet service, or a software, each account sign up indicates a need or interest in what you are offering. It takes a better approach to customer research and deeper insight into your customer support data to surface the “aha” moment you are seeking.
Incorporating these strategies into your business model can make the difference between a user simply testing your product and one who becomes a loyal subscriber. By personalizing user experiences, addressing top concerns, and taking action on the insights that are surfaced from all of your feedback data, subscription-based businesses have a better shot at improving retention and cultivating users who are more likely to convert.
