On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Jennifer Cramer, VP of Customer Success at Planhat about ”is all churn bad”? Jennifer is no stranger to the customer success channel because she is the new VP of Customer Success at Planhat. Prior to her new role at Planhat, she was at SAP where she was the VP of customer transformation and customer engagement and experience. Prior to that, she was the Senior director of customer success at Salesforce. A large part of her career was spent at Salesforce where customer success originated and today she will chat to us all about churn mitigation, lagging indicators, unhealthy customers, and if all churn is really bad. Is it ok to let a customer actually churn? Well, Today we will get Jennifer’s take on what to do with customer churn.
If you think you can start monitoring and measuring churn after six months or maybe right before the renewal – think again! Churn indicators can start as early as in the sales cycle, even though you end up with a successful sale. It’s therefore important to identify and flag them early enough so you can do something about it.
In our discussion Jennifer helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to churn:
- When should a SaaS company start monitoring and measuring churn?
- Which metrics are you using to track churn? Lagging indicators? Are you using data or CSM sentiment to identify possible churn?
- What are some ways that companies can mitigate churn? Is there really a way to avoid churn?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Don’t look at your lagging indicators for churn, because if you’re looking at invoices paid or renewals or whatnot, the customer is pretty much gone if you’re identifying it then
- Every churn scenario can be mitigated. I think, especially if you get the indicators early enough that you have a runway to recoup from it
- I think not all churn is bad because some customers are kind of costing you more than they’re giving you
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!