What do your customer post-mortems look like?

Lauren Mecca

First, a confession - part of me gets excited when certain customers cancel. It's the most powerful data point we have to demonstrate risks and gaps that have yet to be closed. It's also an opportunity to get feedback with no agenda (although, a really good post-mortem CAN get them re-engaged!)

When a customer cancels, what are the best questions to ask them?







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Lauren Mecca
Boston, MA
LM Advisory
lauren@laurenmecca.com
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Lauren Mecca

@Gurdev Anand I know you have a lot of experience with this. Can you share the questions you ask?

Jennifer Griffin

We haven't done this yet, but would love to get this off the ground.  Who leads your Customer post-mortems?

Lauren Mecca

Our CSMs have done the post-churn interviews because they had established relationships.

Kate Persons

Our Dir of CS conducts these calls himself, rather than having the CSMs do it, because he'd like to hear directly from the client and not get the info second-hand from the CSM. Fortunately, the volume isn't so high that this is a burden. He asks just a few open-ended questions and typically the client starts talking and provides more good, organic feedback than a more formal set of questions would uncover.  He asks:

Why are you leaving?

What could we have done differently that would have retained the partnership?

What do you anticipate [new vendor name here] will do better than we did?

Stephanie Waldner

If the intent of the post mortem is to try to run a save play, the CS Director will run ours. These are guided by the conversation, but begin open-ended with "tell me about your decision to cancel..."

We recently started having our Operations team running outreach to customers who are closed lost.  We found that having someone from Operations yielded a better response which we believe is because customers don't have a fear of being sold. For ICP customers, we aim to get a call. For all others, we send a survey. It's been SO helpful for us to aggregate data as well as contrast the CSM's understanding of the churn drivers vs the customer's. Here are the questions:

1) What were the drivers of your decision not to renew? If multiple reasons, please select all applicable

Budget/price/ROI

Chose another vendor

Chose to solution in house

Customer Success experience

Customer Support experience

COVID impact

Merger or acquisition

Poor implementation experience

Product functionality

Product reliability

Technology changed

Wrong time/not a priority

Other:

1a) Please provide additional context on the driver(s) behind your decision to cancel your BetterCloud subscription. If multiple reasons were chosen, please denote the primary reason for your decision. 

2) Did we address the problems you initially set out to solve with our product?
2a) If not, what were the gaps?

3) How are you accomplishing what we previously helped you to solve?
4) What would we have to do differently in the future to re-earn your business?

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Stephanie Waldner
VP of Customer Success
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-05-2020 14:37
From: Lauren Mecca
Subject: What do your customer post-mortems look like?

First, a confession - part of me gets excited when certain customers cancel. It's the most powerful data point we have to demonstrate risks and gaps that have yet to be closed. It's also an opportunity to get feedback with no agenda (although, a really good post-mortem CAN get them re-engaged!)

When a customer cancels, what are the best questions to ask them?







------------------------------
Lauren Mecca
Boston, MA
LM Advisory
lauren@laurenmecca.com
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Kathryn Moore

Lauren, I agree about the power of these data points! We're wrapping up our churn analysis for Q3 and I'm reminded of the ability these patterns have to draw out the gut feelings we have in CS.

I manage our retention team and conduct our post-mortem calls. If the customer mentioned a bit of the reason to their rep, I'll tell them what I know and ask them to expand on it. The conversation evolves from there, but here are a few questions I always make sure to include:

1. X, Y, and Z were your initial goals when you looked for a system like ours. What's changed within the organization since then? (Must be done in a nurturing tone)
2. How are you going to manage your work orders moving forward? (We are a CMMS system)
3. Is there anything we could have done that would have made the application more valuable for you?

Lauren Mecca

Stephanie, I'm interested to know how much of a delta you're observing between CS and Ops understanding of reasons for churn. 

Thanks for sharing these details!

Lauren Mecca

Thanks for pointing out that these questions need to be asked in the right tone!

gurd3v

Thanks for asking!

In my experience, having a script of questions doesn't allow for a fully productive conversation. I always do some preliminary investigation in our CRM to understand what the customers journey has been up to this point. I'll typically ask a fairly open ended question like, "*Customer,* help me understand where we fell short on your expectation from when you first signed up with us."

I'll bullet point the objective topics and take notes in our CRM so that at the end of the quarter we can analyze the results and develop a way to improve our product/experience for customers. 

Happy to dive deeper with anyone interested!