The #1 influencers of churn are USERS
When it comes to renewals and churn, the customer isn't necessarily the top influencer. That's because in B2B customers occupy the role of "purchaser", and they may be purchasing for a staff user base of hundreds or even thousands of users. The purchasers may not even be users themselves. The real power in brand loyalty and influence comes from the vast number of users those purchasers were buying for.
The problem? Users in a B2B customer's org may be your biggest influencer of churn, but are they allowed a presence in your QBRs? Or are you just meeting with the purchasers and hoping for the best?
Potential User Success strategies you can apply:
Users, whether B2B or D2C, have an entirely different set of criteria you'll need to employ in order to approach them. I've led teams to be both empathetic and strategic towards both.
Guided onboarding
The stronger the product onboarding ecosystem, the faster time-to-success.
- Objective: Users need a faster time-to-success, so that learning the product "feels" fast and/or friction-free.
- Key Result: Create better onboarding and tracking, through in-app tutorials, deploying enablement materials, sending new-release onboarding, and increased engagement opportunities through newsletters and Community posts.
- Bonus: Onboarding starts early but continues throughout the lifecycle as an evergreen process, called "everboarding".
Reinforce with low-touch engagements
This is where a DCSM Team can shine. Many small-to-medium business (SMB) users manage things themselves. Like D2C independent users, they manage their own licensing, their own onboarding, and their own renewals. They don't always bring large ARR, so they don't often unlock full-scale enterprise CSM workflows.
- Objective: Reach the highest number of customers/users to apply the most effective risk mitigation possible.
- Key Result: Get Data Team to start running reports through Google Looker Studio for customer segmentation. Commence digital reach-out, using email, Community messaging, and texting, with DCSM Teams monitoring specific mailboxes. Employ playbooks that initiate onboarding, intelligently disperse customers requiring support triage, and mitigate churn.
Medium-touch engagements: hybrid handoffs
Mid-sized businesses may get CSMs, but only for purchases. They don't get the full-spread of enterprise-level training and enablement. Here's where a Digital CSM Team can leverage automated adoption for the mid-size client's staff/user base.
- Objective: Employ playbooks that act as mid-sized models of QBRs. Brand them as SMB Strategy Sessions.
- Key Result: Capture customer information into SMB Strategy Session. Convert data into mid-tier EBR. Deploy to internal product, marketing, sales, and customer teams.
Turn LAER into LASER for User Success
There are two inherent problems with LAER, and both identify known gaps in its construct:
1) Vibe Check with JO + QO: You've heard of Journey Orchestration. Have you also heard of Quest Orchestration? Hint: Quests focus on the goal. Journeys focus on the path.
Journey Orchestration is how a company looks at the operationalized milestones along the customer journey. It is terrific for delivering signals that inform how you manage Lifecycle messaging and motions. However, JO alone doesn't address the larger concern: the points of view of the hundreds or even thousands of users inside of your customer's company. These people don't often have a voice in your CSM Team's QBRs and EBRs.
Reframing their orchestration as Quests is a powerful conceptual shift. Quests are open-ended. They're vibe oriented. They don't care too deeply about the points along any journey. Quests chase the goal. In corporate speak, they're better at closing OKRs, and thus are a direct influence on the success of your LAER campaigns.
In Quest Orchestration, goals aren't tied to renewals or NRR at all. They are tied to purpose-driven usage. Think more in the vein of trial-to-paid or freeware usage. Think about "user count" rather than things like Net Subscription Dollar Retention.
Summary:
The key is to create a "vibe check" and an open-ended orchestration structure to support it. Aim to capture metrics in health based on time-to-value, learning, onboarding & everboarding, feature request capture tools (and reporting on feature progress), and bug burn-down.
2) Engagement Fatigue: After arriving at a certain level of experience, many CSMs discover a common truth - something that keeps coming up in QBRs (B2B). Digital CSMs also notice it in reply-to emails and Community posts (D2C). It's called engagement fatigue.
Once a customer or a user goes through the Land and Adopt processes, they arrive at a tipping point - a threshold for tolerating sales, marketing, and even their assigned CSMs.
Example: If the software they bought is a creative tool, then the user simply needs time to play; time to actually be creative with the app.
We all know QBRs are where it's at, but at this point they don't want to be bothered by anyone. Thus, this is where CSMs notice their QBRs seem to grow stagnant. The parabola curve of adoption tapers off, and the next questions about expansion get "put off until later".
There is a fix. I call it LASER-Focus.
- LAER is envisioned from the vender's perspective.
- LASER reimagines it from the customer's point of view. It incorporates many different metrics and goals, including new ways of experimentation as well as new workflows surrounding TTV (time-to-value) and CLV (customer lifetime value).
What's the "S" stand for?
Reach out to me. I'll go into detail.
(And yes... it has everything to do with "User Quests".)