How to Use the Voice of the Customer in Your Renewal Conversations

Customer Success (CS) has become a larger priority for many companies in the past five years as the shift to SaaS subscriptions has become the de facto standard for most license models, and customers can more easily switch vendors with little effort. So making sure your customers are happy is vital to ensure companies are achieving a best in class churn rate, usually somewhere between 5-7%.

Yet as companies continue to grow at double and even triple digit growth, even the 6th hottest job according to LinkedIn can’t keep pace. What happens when your Customer Success Mangers have to manage 40-100 customers each? Just sending a few emails and responding to support tickets is not enough, you need automation. 

Luckily for many companies, there has been a rise in the Customer Success technology space, who are able to analyze customer interactions and apply machine learning to help identify churn risk. 

A lot of this data can be found in CRM, email, support tickets and conversations between companies and their customers. However, many organizations realize that like Sales, you have to develop a relationship with your customers, and having live conversations is important to developing rapport, identifying challenges, and growing the business. 

And these conversations are GOLD!

Gold, the defacto measurement of wealth in most societies. The benchmark for safe investments. Yet gold has to be mined. 

Conversations, like gold, need to be mined as well. Yet most people aren’t very good at mining conversations on their own. Why? First you need to take good notes. Second, you need to then put those notes into a system where everyone can get value from them. Third, you need to verify the accuracy of those notes. 

While the first item you could argue most people do well, we all know that putting accurate data into your systems, aka CRM, is pathetically low because it takes too much extra work. So how does everyone get the gold?

Capturing the True Voice of the Customer

Enter Conversation Intelligence (CI), the platform that enables you to record, transcribe, analyze and sync with your most important systems. 

Imagine you are a CS rep who has calls with four customers per day. Including doing your follow-up work for those calls, that is well over half of your day spent. If you have any proactive work to do, i.e. scheduling meetings, responding to support tickets, sending information to customers on other topics, that is your whole day. When are you going to enter data? 

With CI, the most important parts of your conversations are captured and automatically synced with your CS systems. No extra data entry by the rep, yet 100% data entry completion with the help of a little AI. 

Now rep and managers can spend more time with their customers, have the data to analyze where their risk lies, and strategically spend time with those customers who have the higher churn risk. Time wisely spent means happier CS reps and customers. 

Turning the Vision into Reality

Chorus and ChurnZero have teamed up to deliver this gold mining operation to their customers. With Chorus, your CS can put down the pens, focus on the customer, ask the right questions, and get the insights they need to succeed. These calls are then analyzed by the Chorus AI to identify key moments at topics from the call. The call and these key moments are then synced directly into ChurnZero, where the data is combined with other key information from multiple platforms to identify risk within any given account. And with the call recording available within ChurnZero, reps and managers have the voice of the customer at their fingertips. 

What does this look like in action?

The Chorus team was able to find some very interesting data looking at Renewal Conversations over the past year.

1. 50% of Renewals have a competitor involved
2. YoY there has been a 25% increase in budget risk
3. Customer Executives are involved in 50% more renewal conversations YoY

What could you do as a CS team with this data in ChurnZero?

On the competitor side, by knowing that a competitor, and which competitor, is showing up in your renewal conversation, ChurnZero can set Calls to Action for a variety of people across the organization to mobilize, from Marketing to provide competitive content to leadership getting more engaged with the customer. 

On the budget risk side, with the knowledge that $s are at risk, the team can mobilize to think about creative solutions to enable the customer to remain while still not risking their budget our your churn rate. 

And aligned to the budget risk, knowing that executives are getting more involved in renewal conversations, your team can prepare more effectively to work with them and understand the real pain behind their budget situations and better position yourself to align to corporate goals, not just the benefits of our solution. 

If this data was stuck on a notepad somewhere, how easily could you mobilize your team?