Increase Adoption and Reduce Churn With CS Strategies and Automations

Customer retention helps companies grow during the good times and stay afloat when times get tough.

In its 2023 SaaS Benchmark report, ChartMogul found that businesses who maintained a 60–80% net retention grew by 9.2%. At companies where net retention exceeded 100%, growth reached 49.5%. And that’s during a global period of economic uncertainty. Imagine what’s possible during a typical year. 

If you can listen to your customers’ needs, identify signs that they might churn, and constantly produce value, you can keep customers happy and using your platform more (instead of churning).

Customer success teams are more crucial than ever.

This guide gathers insights from customer success experts to help you increase adoption, decrease churn, and become your company’s ARR hero.

One of the most effective ways to retain customers is by having direct conversations with them and listening to what they have to say about using your product. The more time you spend listening to your customers, the better you’ll be able to guide them on the path to finding value in your platform — because you understand what they want to achieve.

These conversations involve showing customers the features, tools, and integrations that offer the most value for their needs. Continuing these conversations past onboarding helps keep them on that value-finding path. 

What these conversations look like totally depends on what you hope to achieve with your chat. We’ll take a closer look at some of these later, but your options include:

This is the perfect time to discuss customer goals and make sure they have everything they need to continue meeting their goals. This can also be a good time to re-evaluate those goals and see if anything has changed.

Webinars are a great way to add value to your platform. And the questions people ask can help you understand what’s missing from your content.

You can break these down into training for specific segments to deliver highly relevant content to your customers. The more specific you get with these training sessions, the better. It shows that you’re listening to what your customers are saying and actively trying to help them get more value from your platform.

Think of these as less formal check-ins based on past meetings. Maybe you’re following up about a support ticket; maybe you’ve noticed that customers are showing signs that they’re not as engaged as they could be. You can also schedule these meetings when customers cross certain milestones that you’ve discussed with them.

Create customer journey segments

Despite having unique reasons for needing a specific tool, customers often have similar buyer journeys. When you have enough of these conversations with customers, you can create customer journey segments that speak to the needs of your different customer types.

You can segment customers by factors like:

• Industry

• Position within the company

• How they found your product

• Whether they open the emails you send them (or click the links)

• Whether they went through a self-guided onboarding process

• How long their sales cycle was

Regardless of how you segment your customers, you’ll need to learn what’s important to them and how they define value. It can help to use a Jobs to be Done statement for each segment. 

These statements follow a formula:

This helps you know exactly what customers are looking for in a given segment, inform the kinds of content you share, and define value in as clear a way as possible. 

For example, one of Calendly’s Jobs to be Done statements could be:

“When I need more prospective customers to book demos with me. Give me a way to automate that, without any back-and-forth about finding a time. So I can spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time on customer calls.”

"Even though we have different yardsticks in different segments and different products, the underlying thread that binds us all is making sure that the customer finds quantifiable value through the product."

Once you know what a customer hopes to achieve and what segment they fit into, you can work with them to help ensure they reach that goal and ensure they see a strong ROI when using your platform. 

Follow the data

You also have a ton of info in your system about how customers use your platform. The challenge here is knowing which metrics to look at. You likely have a lot of data, and it’s easy to get lost in the details. 

Activation is a way of defining how engaged a user is based on certain criteria. The criteria vary depending on customer goals and the segment they’re in, but you’re looking for things like:

• Are they using all the seats available in their plan? Do they need more?

• Are they regularly engaging with your app or are they more of a casual user?

• Are they using your platform for X, Y, or Z? Is it something they only need once a month? 

• Are they using all the main features or only a handful of features?

Define activation for as many segments as possible so you know what you’re watching for with each customer. When you notice customer metrics aren’t reflecting the usage patterns of someone who’s reached activation and that there are lagging indicators, you can step in and help guide them toward activation.

The metrics you want to keep an eye on depend on how you define activation for the segment. You can track these metrics using customer success platforms or business intelligence platforms, which you can set up to track any metrics you’ve defined as important.

You want to watch for anything that indicates customers aren’t getting value. Typically, you’re going to see patterns that move in the opposite direction of activation:

Using logins as an example: A user who drops slightly below your defined threshold for activation might need a reminder. Grammarly does this well when they send out their “We notice you haven’t used our platform this week” emails to remind users about their product. 

When a user drops significantly below the threshold, it might be time to schedule a check-in. 

These check-ins are your best opportunity to help increase stickiness among your users by showing them value in your platform. Check-ins also give you a stronger sense of what customers need to reach activation, and what’s really holding them back. 

As great as it would be to always schedule 1:1 check-ins, sometimes you have to do things at scale. This is where in-app, on-site, and email surveys can come in handy. Automated surveys give you a way to collect the data you need quickly. You can then feed results into a spreadsheet where the data can be sorted, analyzed, and turned into actionable insights.

Check in on goals

According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, 89% of business buyers are more likely to buy if you understand their goals. The best way to understand customer goals is by checking in with customers.

Have one formal conversation a quarter with your customers to check in on their goals. Along with seeing how their goals are coming along, these check-ins can give you a sense of whether they’re seeing a good ROI. You’ll get an idea of what’s missing from the customer experience and help you find ways to help current customers find the value they need (and provide better service for future customers). 

Ask questions like:

• Is our platform still helping you reach your goals?

• Have those goals changed at all since you started using our platform? If yes, what changed and why?

• Does our platform help you reach your new goals?

• How has your job changed since you started using our app?

• Is there anything you feel is missing from your experience with our app?

• What surprises (good or bad) have you encountered while using the platform?

As in activation conversations, collecting data at scale with in-app or emailed surveys can help you check in on customers. When customers respond with less than stellar answers, you can schedule a call with them to get back on track.

Beyond these quarterly check-ins (both calls and surveys), you should reach out to customers at moments when their customer health scores are getting low or they start to show signs of churning (like if they’ve stopped using core features). 

How do I automate this?

Automation can make short work of most of the tasks involved here. The only thing it can’t do is help you run check-in calls (yet). You can, however, manage tasks with things like:

• Scheduling tools that help your team efficiently set up and manage check-in meetings with your customers.

• In-app pop-ups that share features that other users in their customer segment usually use (industry-specific features or device-based tips that help improve value). 

• A CRM that helps you track customer meetings, capture data, and track where they are on their journey to success.

• Specific communications triggered by customer actions — for example, emails or pop-ups suggesting new features based on usage patterns. 

• Business intelligence platforms, such as Tableau that analyze data in real time, giving you insights that best reflect where your customers are in their journey, what their customer health scores are, and what features they’re using (among other things).

There are no absolutes when it comes to increasing adoption and reducing churn. You can do all the work mentioned above, but change is inevitable. If you’re not ready to meet that change, churn will happen.

Avoid creating a stale experience after onboarding by building a culture of experimentation and fine-tuning as you go to help increase value and adoption.

"With adoption in particular, we think we understand all key components of what signifies that a customer is getting value — what signifies that the customer is a healthy customer. But you have to question that continually, experiment, and prove things out."

How do you continuously tweak and refine? Ask a lot of questions about how your customers are experiencing your platform and make small changes to see what happens. It won’t always be a success, but the more you do it, the more likely you are to find what works.

Sample survey questions: 

• How frequently do you log in to use our product? What could be done to increase that frequency?

• What kinds of tasks do you use our platform for? 

• Is there anything you wish our platform could help you with that it currently can’t?

• Are you getting the support you need when using the platform?

• What can we do differently to help make your job easier?

• Is the content you’re receiving helpful?

• Do you like the way it’s delivered? If not, what’s the best way to get content to you?

What can you experiment with?

What you can change depends largely on what the metrics you’re tracking are telling you. 

They’ll give you an idea of how a customer is using your platform — and what they’re not using it for. When you see gaps in engagement or notice certain segments of users aren’t reaching activation, you know there’s room to adjust. 

Once you see where things are lagging, you can try:

Highly technical audiences, for example, like content created by people with a deep understanding of the technology. Having a dedicated developer relations (DevRel) marketer or team can help create this content, although interviewing your developers for content can help too.

Whatever you try, it’s essential to keep going. A few experiments won’t cut it. You need to continue thinking about the little changes that might improve user adoption.

"We have a hypothesis that is informed by data and research. And then, we create content, roll it out, and test it to see if it’s driving the engagement and adoption we want. If it is, great! How do we accelerate that or scale it? And if it's not, great! We learned this wasn't the answer. Now what’s our next hypothesis?"

Your customer success team can promote experimentation in a couple key ways: 

Get teams talking about what’s working and what isn’t for your various segments. The more aware your CS team is of what everyone else is doing, what’s working, what isn’t, and any surprises that have happened, the more informed your experimentation process is. 

SMEs can be experts in certain verticals or with customer segments. For example, someone who has a deep understanding of the financial world can help you with customers from the financial world. They can also share specific tips and tricks that your CS team can experiment with across different verticals and segments. 

How do I automate this?

This is where using a customer experience platform can be helpful. With a platform like Gainsight, you can automatically track the metrics you’ve established as important and use that data to improve the customer journey. You can also set up alerts to let you know when customers are showing signs of churning (which you can further integrate using an in-app message or email with a link to schedule a meeting). 

Pro tip

Create good experimentation habits by conducting quarterly churn retrospectives and adjusting your processes, products, and services accordingly. Conversations with your team about how you can improve things, what needs to be improved, and what’s working just fine also offer plenty of useful perspective.