Yeah, to prevent churn, in my opinion, I think you asked me to know what my three top things are to do to prevent churn.
So first, make sure the customer sees value, right. If they don’t see the value, they’re not going to use your product because it’s not helping them get from point A to point B. So, you need to constantly make sure that you’re engaged with customers, you understand how they perceive value, it’s not about what you make, it’s how they see it on all levels, not just your main point of contact, not just your champion.
It includes the executives, the decision-makers, the end-users that are using your product. You need to really understand what are they gaining by using your product, it’s not about features, it’s about the value. It’s about how can they reduce their costs, increase their revenue, gain better productivity, or just do a better job right and this is something that you really need to be on top of and you need to measure, and you need to constantly make sure that whatever they pay you, they perceive to get more value out of that, right, because at the end of the day, when they come to a decision where I continue to another year, right, if I’m paying X, I want to at least get x plus one. Right, so this is the most important part, and this is what customer success is all about value.
Now, to help us with that, I’d say the second most important part or maybe both are number one, in my opinion, is to build strong relationships. First, it’s good and it’s fun. Right, you’re working with people. It’s part of the job that I really love. Strong relationships will help you, especially in difficult times, where something is not working. Sometimes there is a bug in the product, sometimes you promise something, and you don’t deliver. Sometimes, something changes in the company. When you have a strong relationship first, it will give you the slack and the bandwidth to breathe a little bit. When things get a little harder, it will also enable you to discover things much sooner, and provide you more time, to act upon and change right.
If I have a good relationship with my champion and he’s here, there’s a new boss in his company and they might want to bring a different product because you’re used to it. You will most likely reach out to me and provide me with some intel about what’s going on. And then I can act upon it, I can proactively reach out to this new person in the company and ask what they want to achieve, what are their goals, see how I can help them, instead of getting to this point of, they’re already telling me that they’re moving to a different product, there’s little to none that I can do so strong relationship is key.