The other day, I was working with an entrepreneur who seems to have everything going for him. He has a growing customer base, happy investors, and plenty of runway.

When we started talking about various challenges and opportunities, he mentioned that although he launched over a year ago, he still did not feel like he had proven the “sticky” value of the product. This was a mature observation that showed real product management chops.

Imagine for a second that your high-tech piece of awesomeness is actually a simple piece of candy. When customers chew your product up, does its delicious flavor quickly fade like a stick of Juicy Fruit gum? Hopefully, you are more like a Tootsie Pop, which keeps customers engaged in the long run and makes you keep finding new reasons to love it (apologies to those readers who have forgotten their candy-eating childhood).

Many products are super slick, but for one reason or another, they just don’t keep users or buyers engaged. Many times, products that don’t demo well become invaluable, continuing to surprise and delight customers long after the sales team has gone home.

Excellent user experience design is like camouflage for this problem. Weak products with bad UX quickly end up as roadkill. Uncompelling products with a great UX can fake it for a while, only to end up with customers who don’t renew their contracts.

High customer churn equals death for a SaaS business. Churn can happen for many reasons. The hardest to admit and fix is that a product that performs as designed is simply not as compelling as product marketing thought it would be. No amount of account management, limitless sales incentives, or improvements in call-center training will fix it. Put your hat in your hand, go back to your defected customers, and instead of simply asking them why they left, ask how else you can help.