# Prevention is Better than Cure

Prevention is better than cure – it’s an age-old adage that can be applied to the health of your customer churn and retention rates.

## When to Engage with Customers
When should you engage with your customers to prevent churn? If you are waiting for someone to stop logging in, unsubscribe, or cancel, you’re too late. Don’t wait until customers stop using your product before doing something about it.

Customers stop using your product when they no longer see the value it brings. It’s not usually a sudden thing. There are often leading indicators of churn, like inactivity or limited usage. It stands to reason that customers who use your product more frequently and in multiple ways are less likely to churn.

## Understanding Limited Usage
Limited usage can be seen as either narrow usage or shallow usage. Narrow usage occurs when a customer uses your product for a single specific purpose (e.g., sending a monthly newsletter to customers), while shallow usage occurs when a customer is using various parts of your product but in a very basic way and not going deep on most (or any) features. So to prevent customer churn in those instances, you need to expand customer usage. Educating your customers in the parts of your product they’re not using is a great way to achieve this.

## Video Lessons at Intercom
For example, one of the ways that we tackle this at Intercom is by creating video lessons.

These lessons are short learning modules that teach our customers things like how to use a particular feature or set of features that will be of value to them, or how to implement a specific idea or strategy. The lessons are designed to be easy to digest and their aim is always to introduce the customer to actionable takeaways they can start using right away.

### Lesson 1 - Grow your business with in-app messages

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Another lesson, created to deepen usage, offers customers three tips on optimizing their messages to achieve real results for their business. This is targeted at customers who are using Intercom a lot but aren’t using our advanced features, like [setting goals](https://www.intercom.com/blog/help/onboard-and-engage-customers/see-how-your-messages-are-doing/measure-message-effectiveness-with-goals-and-ab-testing), [A/B Testing](https://www.intercom.com/blog/help/onboard-and-engage-customers/see-how-your-messages-are-doing/measure-message-effectiveness-with-goals-and-ab-testing), and [reports](https://www.intercom.com/blog/help/onboard-and-engage-customers/see-how-your-messages-are-doing/your-messages-report-explained).

### Lesson 2 - Optimize Messages to get REAL results

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Helping your customers take incremental steps towards being more successful allows them to continually realize the value of your product and reduce churn. This doesn’t need to be a resource-heavy task and with [user auto messages](https://www.intercom.com/blog/help/intercom-s-key-features-explained/sending-messages/how-user-auto-messages-work) you can ensure you are reaching out to your users at the first sign that they need you most. So there’s no need to delay, it’s easy to [get started today](https://www.intercom.com/blog/help/intercom-s-key-features-explained/sending-messages/how-user-auto-messages-work)!