Learn from Churn #4 – Inconsistent page visits

Customer Success is an interesting space. There are days when you get to be a crime sleuth and solve a customer churn issue by looking at data and meticulously piecing them together. This blog is a part of the series “Learn from Churn” where I recount the churn stories from my last SaaS startup.

In my last post, I discussed a case where we found churn to be related to the feature requests raised by a customer. You can read it here.

So, let’s look into the next mysterious churn story: the case of inconsistent page visits

This was a smallish customer with an ACV of $20,000. All their call signs were good and they appeared to be happy. They were spending enough time on the product and it all looked good. However, at the time of renewal, they balked. We were stumped. Have a look at the comparative data of two customers – one happily renewing with us and the second one is the customer in question.

In fact, we had categorized these guys as “high usage” customers. To see them threaten us with churn was a serious blow. Here is a quick comparison of the 2 customers. See if you can spot the customer issue?

As you can see, the Churn Threatening Customer’s page visits were erratic. It went up and down wildly over the days of a week. In contrast, a similar-sized happy customer was using the solution consistently over the whole week.

Our customer success team interviewed the customer and found out they had a few new untrained new users. The properly trained users were doing their jobs well and doing it consistently. The new untrained users were not doing the work regularly and caused massive spikes with piled-up work.

The lesson was clear. It is not enough to just look at the average page visits and be content.

The consistency of the page visits is equally important.

So, we added one more customer health KPI of page visit consistency and the new KPI showed a few more customers suffering from this problem. Thanks to this new KPI, we were able to isolate them early and intervene with our training department to get the users trained. Sadly, this came pretty late for this customer and we lost them.

But, the exercise strengthened our catchment systems and we never saw this issue repeat itself – so some win in the end!

Learn From Churn: Lesson 4

In my next post, I will be giving an example of a churn threat where the customer’s subscription data showed something truly baffling! Stay tuned.