When it comes to customers, every company will win some — and lose some.
In truth, every company faces some degree of customer churn, whether it’s related to budget constraints or a shift in business strategy, and they rely on their customer success teams to fight against it as much as possible. Serving as the first line of defense against churn, customer success managers take various approaches to churn prevention, ensuring that customers get value out of the product or service they’re using — and recognize this impact.
At Pinwheel, Director of Customer Success Jason MacMurray and those on his team focus heavily on usage metrics to do this. He shared that CSMs are expected to watch out for upward or downward trends in product usage.
Considering Pinwheel’s revenue is partly impacted by usage, it’s key for the company’s CSMs to carefully monitor any shifts so as to identify potential churn early on. By taking the right steps and staying proactive, MacMurray explained, his team ensures that customers can see the impact a product or service has — and hopefully generate more renewals in the process.
Read on to learn more about the strategies CSMs at Pinwheel employ to fight against customer churn.
'A Better Financial Ecosystem'
Founded in 2018, Pinwheel is driven by the aim to create “a better financial ecosystem for everyone.” The company unlocks API access to payroll systems, enabling financial institutions to securely update direct deposits and access data related to income and employment.
What key metrics or indicators does Pinwheel use to identify potential churn among customers, and how do you leverage this data to proactively prevent churn?
We rely heavily on usage metrics. We’ve developed a dashboard that highlights trends in usage among our customers, comparing daily, weekly and monthly usage against historicals so we are able to quickly see if usage is trending up or down; our revenue is partly driven by usage. CSMs are encouraged to keep a daily eye on the report to intervene as soon as we see any sort of material drop that we are not expecting.
Can you provide an example of a successful churn prevention strategy implemented by Pinwheel and the impact it had on customer retention and business performance?
Logo churn is much less of a threat in our business than usage churn. Usage churn is something we are always monitoring and attempting to mitigate. Our most useful strategies revolve around early detection and doing an analysis of why we think the inferior results are occurring. Based on that analysis, we have a series of suggestions and/or efforts we will put in place to improve their results.
“Our most useful strategies revolve around early detection and doing an analysis of why we think the inferior results are occurring.”
We’re confident that the suggestions we are making are correct and will impact results. Typically, the challenge lies in convincing the customer that the efforts are worth the cost to put in place. We do this through projections of the impact those changes will have. In many cases, we have been proven to be right over time. We highlight those successes to build our business case.
