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Churn Monster: Championless
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It’s now been a full year since we first launched the churn monster blog series, can you believe it? Over the course of the past year we have featured a new churn monster each month and taken a look at a life-like scenario involving that churn monster (i.e. customer churn risk) and how that churn monster might be successfully defeated.
We hope you have found the advice to be useful in overcoming common obstacles in your customer retention efforts.
Today, we are going to talk about a championless churn monster. This is when a customer who used to be your advocate or main point of contact at an account has left their role at the company, leaving you championless, making the likelihood of a renewal uncertain.
Let’s take a look at a scenario involving a championless churn monster and see what you can do as a Customer Success Manager in this situation.
The Scenario
You come back to your computer after lunch one day at work to see that you have received an automated alert from your Customer Success management platform notifying you that, Cayleigh, a main point of contact at one of your customer accounts, hasn’t signed into your product in the last 15 days. Since she is a power user and typically logs in a few times a week, you immediately find this strange.
It’s been a little bit of time since your last check-in with Cayleigh and you wonder if she is just on an extended vacation? You decide to shoot Cayleigh a note to make sure everything is okay, and you automatically get a bounce back email saying that Cayleigh is no longer with the company.
This is definitely not what you wanted to hear. You are worried with your champion gone a lot of things about the account become rather unclear. What do you do?
Plan of Action
First, you decide to look Cayleigh up on LinkedIn, and send her a private message. After chatting with her, you come to find out that there was a bit of a re-org and she was unexpectedly let go from the company. You really enjoyed working together with Cayleigh, so you are sorry to hear this news.
You let her know you will keep an ear out with your other accounts that are in her area, to see if they have any job openings that she might be a good fit for. You also ask for more details about the re-org and get her advice on who might be the best person for you to reach out to in her absence.
As it turns out, Cayleigh’s direct report is still with the organization, and she feels she would be the best person to reach out to. You thank Cayleigh for the information, wish her luck in her search and let her know you will be in touch with any job opportunities you become aware of.
You then send an email to the person that Cayleigh suggested, saying you would like to set up a call to chat about the recent business changes and offer your assistance during this time of transition. During this call you recommend getting the remaining team members up to speed on the platform and to fill them in on projects that Cayleigh had on deck.
You schedule a training session with Cayleigh’s direct report and one other team member. Both of them are really blown away with the capabilities of the platform and seem excited about taking over the projects.
After two months you have gotten things fully back up to speed to where they used to be prior to Cayleigh’s departure, and you have two new champions, leaving you less vulnerable like you were before with only one power user.
Even better you were able to send a job lead over to Cayleigh and she has since started a new role at one of your existing customer accounts, which is a win-win – that you were able to help out a customer and you now have an instant champion at that company.
Cayleigh’s old company has also since come up for renewal, and with your two new champions in place and the progress they were both able to make in the last few months, getting that approved was a piece of cake.
Awesome job at defeating that customer churn monster and winding up on top!
Follow the links below to check out the other churn monsters we’ve covered over the past year.
- Churn Monster #1 – Disengaged Customer
- Churn Monster #2 – Cash-Strapped Customer
- Churn Monster #3 – Slacker Customer
- Churn Monster #4 – The Victim Customer
- Churn Monster #5 – Manic Customer
- Churn Monster #6 – Abandoned Customer
- Churn Monster #7 – Stuck Customer
- Churn Monster #8 – Ghosted Customer
- Churn Monster #9 – Cheater Customer
- Churn Monster #10 – Bad Fit Customer
- Churn Monster #11 – Acquired Customer
To learn more about the churn monsters that might be in your closet, download our churn monster playbook, which can be your definitive guide in fighting customer churn.
Customer Success Around the Web
- Get Your Customers to Stop Ghosting You – One of the most common and frustrating scenarios for CSMs is when a customer ghosts you. Find out what you can do in that situation.
- Customer Success and Upsells: How to Make the Most of Opportunities – Take a look at how you can generate upsell opportunities and encourage continued expansion.
- Customer Success Trends By the Numbers – See what the current trends are in the CS industry.