Reducing Customer Churn and Improving Renewal Rates

Pawan Deshpande is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, and a Head of Product & Growth at Linea. He has founded multiple successful companies, including Curata, a content marketing and analytics software company. Pawan has extensive experience in customer success and has implemented a critical care framework to improve customer retention and satisfaction.

Pawan shares his experience with customer success and introduces the concept of critical care, a proactive approach to customer support. He discusses the four distinct ways companies handle customer success: reactive support, onboarding, business reviews, and critical care. Pawan emphasizes the importance of a culture of ownership within the customer success team and the need for proactive monitoring of customer health. He also highlights the role of instrumentation and telemetry in detecting issues and setting appropriate thresholds. Pawan concludes by discussing the mindset shift required for effective customer success and the potential for upselling within the customer success role.

HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT
[00:05:11] Discussion of the challenges faced by Curata and the need for a culture change
[00:07:28] The importance of breaking down silos between customer success, sales, and product/engineering teams
[00:09:00] Creating collaboration between customer success and sales through pod structures
[00:10:36] Outcome-oriented goal setting for customer success teams
[00:11:01] Reactive support is like urgent care for customers
[00:16:58] Building instrumentation and telemetry into the product is important
[00:31:04] Importance of setting up thresholds for customer intervention
[00:38:21] Incentivizing customer success team through variable compensation
[00:41:42] Customer success is more important than sales for sustaining a business
[00:46:30] Client success should be involved in upsells, but may need partnership

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Learn more about Pawan Deshpande: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pawandeshpande/
How to Make QBRs Valuable for Your Customers: https://forc.mx/3s1Q3Jz
Become a Must-Have Solution for Customers in Any Economy: https://forc.mx/45ZRo1z

HIGHLIGHT QUOTES

[00:06:36] So what I did is I pulled my desk into the customer success room. And it was really eye-opening when I pulled up a desk in there and I would just work out of there and hear the conversations. What I really heard was a culture of futility. - Pawan Deshpande
[00:10:18] And that's like the impetus for critical care. That was one of the key instrumentations we had was detecting if someone hasn't used the product for 14 days, then we kind of swarmed the customer and tried to revive the account. - Pawan Deshpande
[00:22:37] And just on the usage, you know, that was particular to us and not all companies are like that. Our product is more like a gym membership. If you don't go to the gym every day, you're probably not going to show up ever again. - Pawan Deshpande