Quick Summary: Proactive customer retention requires moving beyond reactive saves to systems that detect risk early, reinforce value continuously, and scale with AI and automation. With tactics like refined ICPs, smarter onboarding, journey mapping, and in-app engagement—plus strategies that prioritize NRR and customer outcomes—CS teams can drive predictable, long-term growth.
If your customer success strategy is still centered around catching churn in real time, you’re behind. In 2025, the top customer leaders are engineering retention by building systems that detect risk early, reinforce value continuously, and empower every team member to act..
While reactive “saves” will always matter, they’re no longer enough when your CFO wants revenue predictability and AI-powered competitors are reaching your customers faster than ever.
Shifting your team’s mindset to proactive customer retention is a major shift, but the good news is that you can start now. All the pieces of a proactive customer retention strategy are already here, so let’s start with nine proven tactics and strategies designed to make your CS program smarter, faster, and more proactive by design. Tactical tips can be effected immediately, while strategic tips may take more planning and collaboration across teams. The technology tactics are, in our opinion, must-haves for any CS team using a customer success platform.
1. Tactic: Refine your ICPs to refocus on the right customers.
Target the right customers and it will be easier to build the right revenue base. Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are the perfect blend of relationship-building with scalable systems and processes. By segmenting appropriately, any CS team can track behaviors or signals to build the right outcomes for both customers and retention.
- Positive signals: Product usage, onboarding timeline and milestones completed, time to value, support interactions, NPS per segment.
- Negative signals: Low engagement, missed milestones (or lack thereof), recurring support issues.
Find out more: How to protect GRR more effectively as a customer leader.
2. Tactic: Meet your customers in person.
According to the most recent Customer Success Leadership Study, 82% of customer success leaders are investing in in-person customer meetings. Those with mature CS strategies understand that no customer tactic works in a vacuum, but this may reinforce how important a balanced ICP and subsequent customer journey are.
Additionally, those from the study who reported increasing in-person meetings, also reported bigger deals, increased NRR, higher team growth, and a lower CSM load.
Find out more: Why are in-person meetings so effective for retention?
3. Tactic: Refine your customer journey map.
If your company is looking for operational and financial alignment, customer journey mapping can be the start of that alignment ripple effect. And if you’re not mapping the journey? According to research from our friends at Growth Molecules, companies lose 15-20% of potential revenue growth when failing to map, identify, and act on conversion or upsell opportunities. Despite the hard numbers, customer journey mapping is about storytelling first. Are your ICPs filled out with accurate stakeholder personas and sentiment at different phases? Has your team and company defined and formed consensus around your primary customer success stories? (And if you don’t have one, what’s your list of tasks to complete to get there?) And finally, have you built out different versions of these journeys based on your customers’ unique experiences and product usage? Personalized outreach and engagement means planning for the future (goals and revenue), instead of reacting to the present. Find out more: Why customer journey mapping is essential for go-to-market alignment.
4. Strategy: Prioritize NRR.
Whether your customer team is collaborating with other departments for revenue outcomes, or you outright own renewals and expansions – prioritizing net revenue retention (NRR) is how you will connect customer outcomes to revenue. And that connection earns your CS team independence, stability, and influence. Based on SaaS Capital’s 14th annual B2B SaaS benchmarking survey results, NRR across all quartiles and ACV levels are growing. And a reminder: the sky’s the limit when it comes to NRR benchmarks and goals (i.e. the ability to go above and beyond 100%, unlike GRR). More good news: the higher your NRR, the more your growth rate will increase. Find out more: 2025 SaaS benchmarks on retention and AI.
5. Tactic: Equip your CSMs to conduct churn analysis.
We know we said focusing on churn is reactive, but we can’t ignore it altogether. If CSMs can operationalize their process of tracking behavior and outcomes, then proactive planning gets that much easier. We’re fans of Naomi Aiken’s Outcomes Club model, which focuses on four components that CSMs research and present to the team on a regular cadence:
- Top signals
- Value realization summary
- Financial impact
- Customer watchlist
Find out more:
- How to empower your CSMs to own and analyze customer churn.
- Churn analysis: 3 approaches to getting to the bottom of churn.
6. Strategy: Double down on onboarding
Customers don’t decide if they’ve found value only when you circle back for a renewal conversation. Engagement starts immediately and is ongoing, from a discovery call and negotiations to training new users down the road. So don’t dwell on what’s gone wrong in the past; assess the present and identify new ways to support those customers. Use a checklist to gauge the health of your current onboarding strategy:
- Is your onboarding team cross-functional?
- Is your onboarding process a framework or a free-for-all?
- Have you segmented your customers yet?
- Are your metrics aligned with your goals?
- Is your onboarding process multi-phased?
- Are you talking with your customer?
Find out more:
- How to optimize your customer onboarding strategy: a six-point checklist.
- Is your customer success charter out of date?
7. Strategy: Prioritize customer outcomes and accountability
Sometimes customer accountability is as much about internal team expectations, as it is about that customer’s individual goals and outcomes. Alignment is key – are you regularly collaborating with product, sales, marketing, support, and finance to ensure a shared strategy and customer journey expectations? And at the same time, are you holding your customer accountable with milestones and options when things go awry? The process can vary depending on your ICP and company processes (i.e. pre-mortem planning meetings, formal feedback process with product, open door customer meetings for other departments). What shouldn’t waver is repetition and consistency. Reiterating customer goals and outcomes (internally and in customer meetings) means validating those goals and the process around them. Find out more:
- How to hold customers accountable, and other outcomes-based customer success best practices.
- How to guide customers to better outcomes with customer success psychology.
8. Technology tactic: Set up in-app engagement
We’re big advocates of bringing automated engagement and communications tools together in one place. ChurnZero’s in-app engagement covers every step of the customer journey, improving retention and mitigating surprise churn across:
- Onboarding for welcome messages, guides to key features and resources, and comprehensive product tours.
- Relationship building via pop-up messages and in-platform surveys for every milestone, anniversary, and achievement.
- Retention-focused automated triggers based on user behavior, including completion and abandonment rates.
- Product adoption made easy with highlights on lesser-used features, new releases, and sticky features.
- Collaborate with specialized Success Centers for newly onboarded or admin-level users.
- Segment based on different industries, products, or customer types, and tailor communications to deliver the most relevant resources.
- Educate early and often with tutorials for every step of the customer journey.
Find out more: ChurnZero’s automated digital engagement tools.
9. Technology tactic: Integrate AI innovation
The latest data from SaaS Capital’s 2025 benchmarking report indicates that 65-70% of SaaS companies now use AI in their day-to-day operations. The usage of AI is still unevenly spread, however, so there’s still a significant early adopter advantage for CS teams using tools like ChurnZero’s Engagement AI.
Engagement AI pairs analysis of customer interactions with health scores, product usage, and other empirical data, to provide insights into each customer relationship at both the individual and account levels:
- Sentiment analysis tracks engagement patterns over time, recognizing shifts in customer interests and allowing the CS team to address issues before they escalate.
- Relationship scores provide at-a-glance customer health as it stands today.
- Relationship maps for individual contacts in each account enable hyper-personalized service based on what matters most to each of them, generating more personalized customer journeys based on shifts in the data.
- Discussion topics and topic tracking uncover customer themes and challenges, to both anticipate issues and take advantage of growth opportunities.
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