Creating Meaningful Customer Interactions To Reduce Churn

I’m not asking my CSMs to resolve support tickets. I’m asking them to leverage them. Support tickets aren’t just a backlog of problems; they’re customer truth bombs waiting to explode. If you’re not mining them for insights, you’re flying blind—and that’s exactly how churn sneaks up on you. Every Customer Success team I’ve ever led has been trained to use Support tickets strategically. Why? Because they’re packed with insights that make us better at our jobs. ✅ We learn more about the product. ✅ We spot trends before they become problems. ✅ We understand our customers’ use cases more deeply. If you’re not tapping into support data, here’s what you’re missing: 🔥 Emerging Pain Points Recurring issues expose friction in the customer journey. Ignore them, and those minor frustrations turn into churn-worthy headaches. 🔥 Product Gaps Customers vote with their tickets. If the same feature requests or usability complaints keep surfacing, your roadmap is practically writing itself. 🔥 Engagement Risks A spike in tickets isn’t just noise—it’s a flare. Users don’t submit tickets when they’re thriving; they do it when they’re stuck, frustrated, or in need of more enablement. Here are a few ways my team and I are using these insights: ✅ Spot & Engage Struggling Users A surge in ticket volume? Proactively reach out before frustration turns into a cancellation. ✅ Create Targeted Content If the same questions keep coming up, turn those insights into help docs, webinars, or office hours. ✅ Surface Expansion Opportunities Seeing frequent feature requests? Build them—or better yet, use them to tee up expansion conversations. ✅ Map Out User Behavior Support tickets tell you who’s onboarding, who’s adopting new features, and who’s stuck. Use that data to drive deeper engagement. ✅ Collaborate with Product Your product team needs this intel. Share support trends regularly to influence meaningful fixes and features. High ticket volume isn’t necessarily a bad thing—but you need to know how to use it to your advantage. Bottom line? CSMs don’t need to fix support tickets. But the best ones know how to use them to drive retention, expansion, and adoption. _____________________________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share learnings, advice and strategies from my experience going from CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

Last week we had our first churn 💔 It hurt, especially considering that Mailability.io is a SaaS bootstrapped company with no funding. After a few months of successfully winning and onboarding numerous clients, seeing revenue value from day 1, we saw a client walking away, for the very first time. Without even giving us a chance. We just completed the implementation, went live and started seeing the first $$$ coming in. The next day the phone rang. They said their team was too small to handle another solution, and so they left. After a few failing tryouts to get the client back, our first reaction was disappointment. A few hours later we've already agreed that we will turn this negative experience into a customer experience learning-opportunity goldmine. Since Thursday, we have had 4 debrief meetings. In these meetings we identified the reasons for this churn and suggested effective ways to handle them. And even though there's probably nothing anyone can do to reduce churn risk to 0, it was definitely a must have experience for us as a company. Here are 4 key learnings💡: 1. While ICP is crucial, champion attention is key (even after signing) 🏆 While this client fell perfectly within our ICP, we missed a crucial aspect during the sales process. We wanted to win this client so much that it blinded us from seeing that they just didn't have the attention span to invest their time and energy in a solution like ours at this time. Learning - identifying potential engagement issues early on, can save precious time later (which is our most important asset). 2. Knowledge gaps cause confusion 🤔 The client shared with us that they didn't fully understand critical areas of the solution during the sales process, which caused them to enter the onboarding phase with technical knowledge gaps.  Action - added two additional slides to our sales decks. One explains how our solution works end-to-end. The second explains the onboarding process and the time required from the client during this phase. 3. Choose the communication channel that works best for your client 💬 We work with Slack to communicate with most of our clients, but in this case it didn't work smoothly. It took us a few days to realize that communication wasn't streamlined and moved to email. Learning - while suggesting your preferred communication channel, ask the client for their preferred channel of communication and follow their lead. 4. Clean and organized onboarding process with $ value from day 1 🤝 We've identified the weaker areas of our onboarding process and corrected them with clear objectives and action points.  - Added a few product recap slides to the onboarding deck to make sure everyone is aligned. - Added a clear timeline of required tasks, starting from high-impact / low time investment ones.  - Identified milestones requiring the client to review and confirm our setup, before launch. What have you learned from your churn experiences? Share in the comments!

Here’s how Kyle Norton (CRO) helped fixed churn at Owner.com—and why most of us attack it backwards. When he joined in 2024, the metrics were great, they were growing fast, but churn wasn’t “world-class.” The problem? They didn’t truly know why customers were leaving. They didn't have the instrumentation, the data, or the business rhythm. So Kyle rebuilt the system: 1. Tighten the aperture (twice). They narrowed ICP hard—even if it meant fewer logos at first. Using two ML models (likelihood of payments volume + an Estimated Turn Rate “E-turn” score), they lifted GPV thresholds and stopped signing customers who weren't big enough to get real value from the platform. 2. Prioritize configuration quality over speed. Everyone preaches “faster TTV.” Their data showed the opposite. Slowing onboarding to achieve a higher-quality setup improved retention more than shaving days off go-live. They created a Growth Potential Score to grade each launch like golf: higher score = more to fix. 3. Make retention truly cross-functional. “Everybody owns retention.” Sales sets expectations. Onboarding nails configuration. Product closes value gaps. CS resolves repeat tickets fast. Leadership runs a monthly deep churn review—cohorts, lead source cuts, individual case autopsies—to separate causal from correlational. 4. Show the value, don’t assume it. In some “value churn,” customers were getting results; they just couldn’t see them. Owner spun up workstreams to surface outcomes clearly and often. 5. Operate in two gears. Kyle’s mantra: solve with “non-dual” thinking. Urgent on the day-to-day; abstract on the multi-quarter horizon. Top-down trends + bottoms-up case reviews. That triangulation is where the truth lives. The results? Pre-live churn dropped. Cohorts looked healthier. Fewer but better customers went live. The real revenue impact climbed because they stopped creating future churn at the door. If you’re a real revenue leader, your job isn’t juicing “Closed-Won.” It’s building enterprise value. That means making hard calls today (narrow ICP, slow onboarding for quality) so 6–12 months from now your board sees it in the numbers. Tune-in to my full conversation with Kyle on this episode of the Revenue Blindspots podcast to hear us go deep on the challenges of identifying the true causes of churn and the strategic decisions required to improve retention: https://lnkd.in/eY5cUx7c Sponsored by Otter.ai

Yesterday, we got our first major churn notice. It stung. We felt blindsided. And losing that ARR? It hurts. At the same time, it feels like a rite of passage. This is our first season of annual renewals since we started monetizing a year ago. Here’s the backstory: - A year ago, their buyer purchased UpdateAI as the best-in-class notetaker for customer success teams. - Fast forward to now: their team expanded from 12 to 55 users. - Product-market-fit surveys were glowing. - The new buyer even verbally committed to renewing just weeks ago. But when renewal day came, we got this message: “It’s not about the quality of your product. The team loves it. We’re just consolidating and using another tool we already have.” Translation? We failed to show leadership what we’ve become. They thought we were just a notetaker. But UpdateAI isn’t just a notetaker. It’s a Voice of Customer platform. It distills themes from your customer calls and delivers insights to leadership teams. Here’s where we went wrong: 1.) We expanded product usage with ICs, but leadership never touched the platform. 2.) We had zero recurring touchpoints with decision-makers. 3.) We didn’t educate them on how our product evolved. 4.) We finally met the new economic buyer... one week before renewal. That’s on us. This churn was a wake-up call, and here’s what I’m doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again: A.) Regular touchpoints with decision-makers: Listening to their needs and keeping them up to speed on our evolution. B.) Sharing our vision early and often: UpdateAI isn’t a notetaker—it’s how organizations track, share, and act on customer feedback. C.) Inverting the messaging pyramid: The notetaker is the foundation. But the real value? Turning customer conversations into actionable insights for leadership. I’m still processing this loss and the lessons that come with it. If you’ve dealt with elusive buyers or faced similar challenges, I’d love to hear how you’ve handled it. #customersuccess #churnnotice #NotANotetaker #conversationalintelligence

Churn risks do not show up in bold letters. They evolve quietly, hidden in changes to product usage, new faces at your customer’s table, or a little too much silence during a renewal cycle. Thanks to Steve Fiore for sparking a great question on whether we use automated or manual ways to spot these risks at LinkedIn. The answer: Both, tightly linked together. We monitor data signals including usage insights, AI-powered Gong call analysis, and account and stakeholder risk alerts through LinkedIn Sales Navigator. At the same time, our Customer Success Managers dig deep with annual Renewal Risk Assessments, long before renewal is even a discussion. They sit with the data, then ask: - Who are our champions, and are those relationships still strong? - Has anyone in the stakeholder group changed roles or left? - Is our product sufficiently integrated into their tech stack, workflows, and enablement? - Do their priorities align with the value we provide? - Can our stakeholders articulate and prove that value? They act on what they learn, setting action plans, holding program owners accountable to implementing the action plans, re-engaging drifting contacts, tailoring value conversations to new decision-makers. Tools help us spot signals; people shape the response. Being early and intentional, not just reactive, sets up a higher likelihood of renewal, builds trust, and often surfaces new growth opportunities. Retention happens all year through smart monitoring, curiosity in every interaction, and clear action when needed. For every leader building a churn prevention playbook:  1. Start with your data  2. Empower your people  3. Make every insight actionable