5 customer-facing strategies to boost retention rates

The best churn management programs combine both internal processes and customer-facing playbooks to mitigate risk throughout the customer lifecycle. Now that we’ve shared internal strategies to combat churn, here are five customer-facing plays to consider as you focus on reducing churn and boosting net dollar retention.

1. Ensure a seamless onboarding experience, with a focus on accelerating time to value.

With time to value strongly tied to overall customer satisfaction and lifetime value, a seamless onboarding process is critical. To prevent a Groundhog Day effect for customers, businesses should always conduct an internal kickoff/sales to CS transition session prior to any customer-facing meeting, wherein there is a thorough review of customer goals and prior pain points. Ideally, implementation should be a key topic in pre-sales discussions to avoid surprises following the signature, e.g. sales teams should socialize onboarding plans and technical requirements before a deal closes so that the customer can allocate resources accordingly.

Force Therapeutics is a digital care platform and research network designed to extend clinicians’ connection to patients outside of hospital walls. The team conducts external kickoff meetings within four business days of deal signature; to ensure those kickoffs are as productive and efficient as possible, they use surveys to collect information for each project team stakeholder (administrator, clinician, project manager/lead) in advance of the meeting to help shape a highly relevant agenda.

It is easy for implementation teams to fall into a “lift and shift” trap wherein they are mostly focused on translating the customer’s workflow with the incumbent partner to a new platform. Instead, success should be dictated by customers’ adoption of the new platform’s “sticky drivers.” To make product adoption easier, businesses often need to build technology to guide those outcomes; if you have a critical mass of customers coming from a particular incumbent, perhaps you build an “Incumbent X connector kit” that easily integrates the old data and transforms it into the ideal setup for the new platform.

The team at customer success platform Catalyst recognizes that a customer’s first 30 days set the tone for the rest of the customer journey. Customers enter the onboarding process with grand visions for what they want implemented, but the Catalyst team is deliberately prescriptive about the implementation plan. While they respect customers’ wishlists, they do not allow for the customer’s opinions to set the plan. Instead, Catalyst outlines a clear plan around configuration, training, and foundational workflows, which ensures that customers are adopting the features and use cases that yield the stickiest and happiest relationships.

Lunchbox, which offers a collection of digital ordering platforms for restaurants, requires customers to attend weekly status meetings during the first 30-day window. If customers have no updates or questions, the Lunchbox team uses the time to pre-emptively review FAQs derived from other onboarding experiences.

Communication is also of paramount importance during the onboarding period. A customer-facing project plan is an important artifact for spelling out progress and for highlighting potential risks to project completion. While Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools are powerful, they are best suited for operations with some scale. Earlier stage companies can easily build project plans with tools such as Google Docs or Monday.com. Beyond reviewing this project plan on a regular basis, implementation team leaders should plan for formalized midway-through-implementation touchpoint meetings with the customer’s executive sponsors as well as for a formal feedback loop once the customer has exited onboarding.

Sample Client-Facing Onboarding Plan from Lunchbox

2. Devise customer value plans as living, breathing artifacts for your partnerships.

A good rule of thumb is that your customer status meetings should never entail conversations about the weather. Every interaction should be rooted in a customer value plan that is agreed to at the onset of the partnership and refreshed in each quarterly business review. (Again, ideally, this value planning would start in the pre-sales process.) When considering successful customer engagement, think about the old CEB analogy of a bartender versus a personal trainer: the bartender listens to the customer’s problems and reacts to them (maybe by trying to sell them something additional!), but the personal trainer understands the customer’s desired outcomes and coaches her to get there.

Value plans are designed to do just that — ensure the customer extracts value from their investment — but they also drive focus. All too often customers’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs in the buying process and the “boil the ocean” effect kicks in. With value plans, CSMs can push customers to focus on no more than three strategies or tactics at a time; these tactics should be agreed upon in the quarterly business review and should be the focal point for status meetings for the 90 days that follow. If the customer is slow to adopt the agreed-upon plan, it is appropriate (and important!) to escalate the roadblocks to the customer’s executive sponsor. If the customer implements those three tactics faster than expected, you can certainly accelerate work on the next three.

For Lunchbox’s restaurant customers, the North Star metric is native ownership of digital sales — in other words, what fraction of the customers’ online orders are placed directly through the restaurant. To boost that ratio, Lunchbox structures its value plans around a “growth hacking” playbook that gives restaurants actionable tactics for how to boost direct sales, including templates for loyalty programs, win-back marketing, etc.

Value plans actually become easier as companies scale, as they become richer with customer examples. Ideally, businesses should have a strategy playbook that outlines the 3–5 most important outcomes for that customer set (can vary by industry served, but should not be ad hoc per customer), and then maintain a repository of recommended tactics to achieve those outcomes (with supporting customer case studies and ROI metrics).

Perhaps most importantly, celebrate value. Provide regular updates to client stakeholders in between formal check-ins, whether that be in the form of automated reporting or even just a quick note. Rocketrip, which reduces corporate travel spend by rewarding employees for saving, has made waves in offices after sending cupcakes with little flag adornments boasting the total annual dollars saved for that customer.

3. Ensure quarterly business reviews are happening and meaningful.

Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are a helpful forcing function for ensuring that the partnership is meeting the customer’s expectations, as well as to push value plans and sticky drivers. To avoid unwelcome surprises at the renewal, always include contract details and seek to get a gut check on how the customer is thinking about the renewal, even if it is nine months away!

It is of paramount importance that a senior sponsor from the customer attends the meeting and that any materials reviewed are shared after the fact; if a CSM feels awkward sending a QBR deck to a CMO when only the VP of Marketing attended the session, she should ask her manager or exec to do so. CSMs should not be shy about insisting on rescheduling QBRs if a customer’s senior sponsor is unable to join. QBR coverage is not a vanity metric: the intention is not to have yet another meeting, but rather to drive value exchange with the customer. Great QBRs include customer performance data (including benchmarks vis-a-vis other customers), tactical recommendations for program optimization and feature adoption, and last but not least, a customer-facing product roadmap and a recap of recent releases.

To ensure business reviews land well with their executive sponsors, the team at Force Therapeutics brings together an internal cross-functional team to discuss their relevant customer stakeholders (surgeons prescribing the platform and care team end users who connect with patients through the platform). Armed with information about how the end-users use their technology, Force can deliver a highly customized and thoughtful review (and proposal for growth) to their C-suite sponsors.

4. Establish an executive sponsorship program.

Stakeholder turnover is frequently a top reason for churn, which is why the “high and wide” concept is critical in customer success: when it comes to building relationships with customers, it is a best practice to be three-high and three-wide in terms of the span of contacts. Executive sponsorship programs help with the “height” portion of the equation: it can sometimes be challenging for a CSM to establish a strong relationship with a CEO, but any member of the CSM’s executive team can certainly do so.

The best executive sponsorship programs are tailored, consistent, and focused. If you have a highly technical customer, align a Product or Engineering executive sponsor to the account. Consistency is also critical; executive sponsors should attend QBRs and other key milestone meetings. It is also important to try to maintain the same executive sponsor for a prolonged period of time. (It’s fine for other leaders to check in on a customer if they are traveling to their location or checking in on a specific topic, but the primary executive sponsor should not change.) Because effective executive sponsorship programs are reasonably time-intensive, they should be focused. Rather than assigning an executive sponsor to every account, understand the Pareto dynamics of your business: if 80% of your revenue comes from the top 20% of your customers, focus on building a robust executive sponsorship program for your top 20%.

5. Leverage customer enablement programs.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” (or the duration of a software partnership). Perhaps more important than a proactive customer success program is exhaustive customer enablement. Product marketing is inherently important for educating customers on features and benefits, but customer enablement programs are critical for ensuring customers feel in control of unlocking the benefits of your product.

It is most often the case that customers who attend training programs (or who watch them online) are stickier and happier, so it is worth investing in those programs early and often, even if you are directing customers to a low production quality video. Focus your training programs not only on unlocking the sticky driver components of your platform, but also on support ticket deflection. Study your most frequent support ticket topics and build content around them (e.g. knowledge base articles/FAQ and videos); in addition to making the information discovery possible easier for customers, these tactics also boost margin in the longer run.

A train-the-trainer approach can be powerful for both customer satisfaction as well as business efficiency. The customer success team at Kinetic, a hardware-software company that offers wearable devices to reduce workplace injury (and thus often has to visit numerous industrial facilities for new customer onboarding), recently launched their “T3” train-the-trainer to accelerate time to value for customers. The program, which offers on-site training in one facility supplemented with a knowledge base and other self-service training artifacts, ultimately reduced customer onboarding time by 81% whilst still ensuring extremely high customer satisfaction scores — and increasing scale and margin in the process! After facility managers complete their training, Kinetic empowers them with a Manager Action Plan, a guided form that prompts managers to define their program goals and to select actionable items to focus on throughout their first six weeks with Kinetic. Following form completion, managers receive a customized plan outlining a personalized week-by-week plan (remember those value plans?!).

So far as timing for building a playbook for customer success is concerned, it’s never too soon. While advanced tooling and customer success platforms can certainly be helpful for scaling customer success programs, they are by no means required; the vast majority of the initiatives outlined in our two blog posts can easily be tracked with a reasonable Google Docs setup. When it comes to implementing a customer success playbook, it’s best to follow this Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

— Cassie Young, Primary Operating Partner

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