Game planning for a call after a churn notice

LeahRutz

After a customer gives churn notice, I generally schedule a call to get feedback on their experience with our products and team, understand the reason for churn, see if there's any way to save all or some of the business, and/or go over next steps for offboarding. 

If the customer has been largely unresponsive so you can really only speculate about the reason for churn, what are some strategies or tips you have for this kind of meeting?

Steve Bernstein

I'd like to recommend focusing on getting ahead of it rather than waiting for the churn to get a reason. There are certainly great ways to engage the right customer-stakeholders at the right time with the right messaging so they stop ghosting you and then end up canceling. Getting "deep and wide" feedback by asking your customers to provide online assessments (nay, "NPS") is one way that works well as long as you demonstrate commitment to address what they tell you (that is, make sure there's a "help me help you" in your message to them, and just chucking an email over the wall with this is usually insufficient). When doing this, we see engagement rates improve significantly to 80% and higher.

Silent accounts are certainly the most ripe for churn, and if they won't engage with you via a commitment to address their feedback then you may need to play other cards, such as exec sponsor program (title matching), providing genuine "deep" best practices (not just fluff that we see from vendor marketing all the time), enlisting partners, etc.

I am happy to provide more detail on the idea of feedback as an engagement tool, and look forward to see the other ideas and proven best practices (with evidence/metrics) from the GGR community!
/Steve

Guy Galon

Sharing few tips that worked for me before:
1. Asking for general feedback on new features and /or features that were used by the churned customer and their perceived value.  I had few cases in which customers agreed to provide feedback "wearing" the industry experts hat.
2. Sharing roadmap plans (high level) and asking them for feedback (again - approaching them as industry experts).
3.  Ask them to share their feedback as we (the vendor) are looking to improve and go through a lesson learnt exercise.

I agree with Steve's comments below and the above are usually "post mortem" actions. Proactive approach with good prediction can help to detect these future churn cases in advance and put a mitigation plan in place. You are welcome to read  a blog post I published about prediction tactics in Customer success  associated with potential churn
(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/customer-success-proactive-prediction-guy-galon/)

Guy

Anita Toth

Hi Leah

I agree with both Steve and Guy that a proactive approach is better than a reactive one.

However, customers will always churn and the exit interview you conduct can give you tremendous insights.

It's nice to read you're undertaking these interviews. ??

I've recorded a webinar on How to Conduct Exit Interviews and Use What you Learn to Stop Churn which is the process I use when conducting my client's exit interviews and is based on my 20+ years as a qualitative researcher.

Here's the webinar.

And here's the followup questions that didn't get answered in the webinar/

LeahRutz

Thanks for that webinar recording, Anita! Very helpful and practical.

LeahRutz

Thank you, Guy! I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience!