This week's Newsletter:
Article: Stop Celebrating CS Heroics!
Interview: Data-led retention: Why happy customers don't stay
Quote of the Week: You can't prevent churn if you can't...
STOP CELEBRATING CUSTOMER SUCCESS HEROICS! 🦸🏻♂️
Why rescuing customers sucks and what to do instead↓
Seth Godin recently wrote this:
"There are lots of rewards for heroic saves at work. But heroic saves undermine the desire to build better systems."
► This is the fundamental problem with Customer Success Heroics: they take the place of SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES.
First, heroics consume an enormous amount of time and energy, and engaging in dramatic "customer rescues" is incredibly distracting.
😮💨 This saps energy away from the less grandiose efforts needed to build the processes that would prevent most customer crises from happening.
But the other problem is that CUSTOMER HEROICS DON'T WORK!
While celebrating that latest "customer save," we tend not to notice the many other customers that quietly failed. 😵
Our research indicates that only a small fraction of "customer rescues" result in a renewal (probably less than 10%-15%).
But it's actually WORSE than that! →
📈 The data shows that most "successfully" rescued customers will churn within the next cycle or two anyway!
HERE'S WHAT TO DO INSTEAD:
🛑 STOP CELEBRATING customer success heroics! Stop feeding that instinct with praise and validation.
👉 The right way to view a customer rescue is not as a people success but as a process failure. 👈
Instead, focus on how the customer got to that point and build process...
⓵ Identify the consistent FACTORS that lead to customer crises.
⓶ Design preventative UPSTREAM systems and processes.
⓷ Build systems to detect the risk early BEFORE customers become frustrated.
Recent Interview: Data-led retention: Why happy customers don't stay - and what to do about it
October 4th, 2023 @ 11:30am ET
Hosted by Debra Wilson @ Brainstorm. We discussed how customer results data can help Customer Success teams ruthlessly prioritize their client efforts.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
You can't prevent churn if you can't predict it.
