Overview
Building a process dedicated to your customers retention without a proper methodology can be an endless hole as a lot of factors can have a direct impact on your retention and churn rate.
Depending on your type of customers (low, medium, high touch), acquisition channels, and business model, it is important to choose the right strategy to maximize your impact.
In a perfect world, your customers discover your product, purchase it, and… stay for life with you. That’s why majority of SaaS companies are still putting their efforts on acquisition: retention only comes on the table when new business and expansion are on longer enough to compensate churn.
Different type of Lifecycle Stages
We all have the big idea of customer lifecycle in mind where people search for a solution to fulfil their need and purchase it. Many companies stop their vision here, where it is actually just the beginning of the next journey.
Different lifecycles can be applied once your customers became paying customers. Each one of them have pros and cons and will be more or less relevant according to your customers profiles.
Main customer lifecycle types:
• Time based
• Classic Onboarding, Adoption, Expansion, Renewal: Process based(automated or manual)
• Activity based (milestones)
• The ultimate lifecycle
This example of lifecycle combines tiering needs, process, activity and time based conditions.
Choosing the right lifecycle
Designing relevant health scores
Health scores purpose is to allow your team to understand if your customers are successful at each and every step of your customers lifecycle.
Thus, we highly recommend you to adapt these scores according to the main blockers your customers could be facing and success metrics translated into KPIs, usage or in-app behavior.
If you don’t know where to start, you can start reading “Building CS team for the first time”, and come back for the following methodology.
Once you know which problems your customers are facing, how your solution can help them fix this issue, which blockers can prevent your customers to reach their goals, and which impact your solution will provide them, your can translate their desired outcome into KPIs and success metrics as follow:
Now your know which are your main success metrics to keep track of for your customers, you can first define a threshold above which the customer will be considered as successful, their evolution, and which factors can interfere.
Note: It also might be relevant to combine 2 metrics, or include an other dimension such as your customers satisfaction or your team pulse.
