Can a 3-hour Udemy course really make a difference?

I recently had a Course on Churn Reduction by Udemy. Well, like other courses, I did this with an intention to learn something new but never realised it could bring a change to how my customers’ metrics will look.

This write-up is about what was the objective, what I learnt, what changes I brought to my work and how the results look like-

Objective :

To Identify what is churn and why should our focus be to reduce it?

We all know, losing clients is churn but what we overlook is the fact that churning of customers also means losing on all the efforts done from sales to implementation. Now, the reason an organisation should devise strategies on Reducing Churn is that it shall mean increasing revenue with the same amount of customers. According to Harvard Business Review , the cost of acquiring a new customer is 25X expensive than retaining one. Thus, reducing churn will mean increased profits. Moreover, losing clients might affect the morale of different teams involved with each account.

Learnings :

Formulate Steps at each stage to reduce Churn — from onboarding, pushing it to live and nurturing the customer post it is Live -

Fig 1 Steps to reduce Churn

1. Set the customer’s expectations : Be transparent with expectations to the customer. Understand the outcome they’re about to get with your product.
2. Don’t blame the customers, understand them : To understand reasons for churning — one needs to understand Life-cycle and journey of the customer. Create Road-map for the journey. List down the problems they would be facing and work on it to reduce them.
3. Fix the Problems : They’ll churn not because they didn’t like the product, they’ll churn because what they wanted to get done wasn’t achieved. Hence, fix the problems.

Improvements :

The changes which you can bring in your work can actually create a difference and help you create value in the customer’s life. Three points which helped me grow-

1. Understand your failures. Keep improving yourself : I tried being proactive to their queries and quite frequently followed up with different teams wherever necessary than before. This builds trust. This marks your presence as indispensable to their account, making them believe in your ownership.
2. Prioritise your work : There’ll be tasks which can be categorised as Urgent, Important and both — Urgent and Important. Prioritise your day’s work by listing all those under categories and working on urgent and important, then urgent and then the important ones. This will help you understand and work on the Urgency and Importance on time. The more the degree of both the more the priority.
3. Identify the services which should interest the client: I scheduled calls with the key accounts and listed down the features that will help them reduce their pain-points. This little activity started creating value with the client and I could also raise the flags internally for resolving every small query. A weekly call and introducing them to new features will make them tweak their processes, if any new process can be mapped which can help them benefit from an existing tool.

Outcomes :

Streamlining the work, actively reaching the customers and responding to them proactively yielded what I could have never thought of!

1. It gave us an upgrade of 1.2L in the past 45 days from all the accounts I am managing.
2. Appreciations from customers. When you are working for the client and they recognise your efforts, that’s the goal for any ‘Customer Success Manager’. I’m fortunate enough to be in that niche. One of the customers I onboarded, valuing my dedication, not only praised me for it but also gifted me a10K Amazon gift card as a token of appreciation for helping her achieve her goal within a week of onboarding. This made me realise how important it is to reduce TTFV (Time to First Value)* in customer implementation.
3. Identifying risk at the right time — zero churns in the last quarter.

With a year into Customer Success, I have realised it is more of a customer-centric job — if helping the customers and creating value for your product in their lives excites you, you must go for it!

I would thank Gus for creating such a fantastic, to the point course material which is so useful in real-world scenarios and helped me achieve my goals by applying the same in my work.

*TTFV-Time to First Value. This is referred to as when they first sign up to when they achieve their first outcome. This is achievable throughout the onboarding process — asking right questions and guiding them through the product to drive them to achieve their goal (it can be in parts) through your product that will make them realise the value to your product. This could be first successful Email campaign where they can see open-rates, click-rates and start realising the value of the product they are investing their time on. Thus, Shortening the time for first value shall yield increased retention.