The churn factor that is probably ignored
Customer Success is the hot topic these days in the cloud industry and everybody knows the reason behind it — a huge chunk of revenue depends on how many customers are retained, for which Customer Success(CS) is essential. There has been a lot of discussion on how companies have designed and developed their CS process and team and there are three key points that is being focussed on right now:
- Interaction with the customers: This starts right at the point when the sale is closed. With help from the sales team(they play a major role), the customer profile is understood, help with implementation is done and the metrics are very closely monitored to make sure that the customer is properly on-boarded from where the CS Team takes over. The CS team then interacts with the customers to understand their long-term goals, helps with bugs and basically makes sure that the customer sees value. Often, CS teams define a set period for which the accounts are closely monitored. Overall, this is where a Customer Engagement Model is defined.
- Billing cycle: What better(read obvious) reason do we have than the sudden drop in user license count or any other abnormality? This is also, in a way, related to the pricing of your product. Keep an eye on your competitors’ pricing as well.
- Behaviour inside the product: What percentage of the product is being used? Are they coming online regularly? Do we have a proper tool to take care of such KPIs? — answers to such questions is how we can determine if the product is being used to its full potential or not.
Taking care of these three points pretty much covers most of the aspects of CS. But there is one key element for every account that needs extra care — the SPOC (single point of contact inside the company). There is a very high possibility that cancellations could happen just because the existing SPOC has been replaced by someone who does not know how to manage, or simply does not like the solution/software itself. This becomes even more of a risk factor if there is no proper KT on the customer’s side or when they have not been on-boarded properly into the product.
We at KiSSFLOW are trying to come up with a solution for how this can be minimized. Any suggestions?
