Churn is not just a Customer Success problem. It cuts across the product, support, pricing, usage, customer success, user experience, the solution we are offering, and more. B2B customer churn is a real concern for customer success teams around the world. Churn is inevitable. Period. But the better we analyze churn, the better we will be at reducing the churn.
What is Churn Analysis?
SaaS churn analysis is the evaluation of a company’s customer loss rate in order to reduce it. Also referred to as customer attrition rate, churn can be minimized by assessing your product and how people use it. Some customer success professionals term it customer churn analysis.
So, I think it’s time we set up a process to analyze our own churn. Or we will never learn or even worse we will learn with assumptions and from half-baked data. To open our minds to learning, we need a process, which dictates that we do it right and holistically. Do remember that a closed mind can still deceive a process, although it’s always hard to ignore the data.
So I present to you FAIR, a post-mortem of a churned account.
Pro tip: Why Customer Retention is important for B2B SaaS
FAIR or Feedback, Analysis, Interview, and Review is a process I created within CustomerSuccessBox.
Feedback
Many times they would have been telling us their problems, either customers were too soft in mentioning that, or we were too distracted that we could never capture the importance of it. So we look back at all the feedback, especially feedback received in the recent past and recurring feedback.
Analysis
Data never lies, we analyze the way they have been using the platform:
- Which use cases were nailed, were unaware
- Frequency of the usage, what exactly they use to spend time on
- Which users were consuming?
- Were the right stakeholders using the product?
- How many QBRs had happened? What did you discuss?
- What was the trend of usage?
- Were they showing early signs of churn(drop in usage, not using features)?.
Interview
We do a Post Churn Interview and ask the very fundamental questions.
- What value was getting from your product?
- What is the current expectation from the team (many times this will be different from why they buy in the first place since they would have matured in their understanding and practice)?
- What we could have done / can do to retain your business?
- Will you recommend it to someone? (why and why not)?
Review
Then we sit down as a team (at least success, onboarding, delivery team support, product, all the people involved in the team & most importantly include product team as ) to review all of the above and translate the learnings into actions.
Sample Playbook for Churn Analysis, which gets triggered automatically as soon as customer churns.
Action
Identified improvement areas and blind spots need to be converted to actions. So we will be updating/adding processes, product roadmap, and other practices across functions as required. Sharing learnings, outcomes, and decisions with the entire team.
To simply put :
Churn is inevitable but a detailed analysis will help you get control of unexplained churn and surprise churn.
