Cin7 reduces churn by 60% with digital customer success strategies and ChurnZero plays
Cin7’s inventory and order management platform connects more than 800 eCommerce platforms, online marketplaces, third-party logistics (3PL) warehouses, and native big-box retailer channels in one platform, helping retailers, manufacturers, and product sellers quickly and efficiently get their products to customers wherever they are, from any channel.60%
reduction in churn QoQ
Increased
adoption with usage insights
Scaled
customer success operations and outreach
“For a team that’s small and a customer base that’s global, we’ve been able to reduce churn significantly, specifically through early intervention using ChurnZero plays.”
Ryan Ballein, global director of customer success | Cin7
The Challenge
Cin7 saw rapid growth during the pandemic when the e-commerce market surged.
However, as online spending began to level off, the company noticed slowing demand and increasing churn. “We lacked insight into what was driving the churn and a mechanism to intervene,” said Ryan Ballein, global director of customer success at Cin7.
The company’s customer success team of 12 also faced a scaling challenge. Cin7 serves more than 8,500 customers across a range of verticals in 75 countries. But CSMs only had the capacity to manage the top 200 accounts. Without enough coverage, CSMs acted as support for the rest of the customer base, reactively reaching out when problems arose.
“We couldn’t hire a hundred people to manage our smaller customers,” said Ryan. “It doesn’t work. The economy of scale totally diminishes. We had to start thinking about how to drive engagement digitally.”
Additionally, the company was in the process of merging teams, processes, data, and tools from a prior acquisition. They needed a platform to bring everything together in one place and automate their operations.
Choosing the right tool for the job
Finding such a platform was Ryan’s first project when he joined the organization. “We wanted a tool that had the flexibility to work with our data in its current state, to integrate with a variety of software, and to grow and evolve with us,” said Ryan.
The team pared their vendor list down to three finalists. Ultimately, it was ChurnZero’s flexibility, ease of use, and marketing-grade automation that won them over.
“ChurnZero has marketing automation capabilities, like drip campaigns and filter functionality, that some other customer success platforms are lacking,” said Cori Medler, global director of customer operations at Cin7. “It has a lot more functionality to build digital touchpoints and insert CSMs when appropriate versus having it be a human-led operation.”
Implementation time was also a deciding factor. Ryan had prior experience with another customer success platform that required three to four full-time people to get up and running. “I knew we didn’t have those resources,” said Ryan, “so our focus was on getting value out of a tool fast as opposed to investing a ton of time in implementation, which led us to ChurnZero.”
The Process
With the help of ChurnZero, Cin7 created solutions to:
- Get a centralized view of customers. By unifying their data from multiple products in ChurnZero, the CS team now uses that data to power automation across the customer lifecycle, from onboarding to expansion.
- Build, launch, and iterate scaled digital campaigns with ease. The CS team uses ChurnZero plays to target specific customer segments with content at exactly the right time. “We can see in real-time if a campaign is working,” says Ryan. “The ability to visualize the steps in plays is very helpful when building out campaigns.”
- Increase adoption by driving ideal customer behaviors. The CS team uses product usage data to identify the actions a customer needs to take within the first 30 days after converting from a trial to see success. They then build plays based on that data to encourage desired behaviors. “Now, we understand where our customers are in their journey and we can nudge them in the right direction if we see a drop in adoption,” said Cori.
- Present cross-sell opportunities at the ideal moment. For Cin7 customers, the first six months after onboarding are critical to their long-term adoption. The CS team created plays to guide customers through their initial product setup. They use ChurnZero’s conditional play logic to offer professional services if a customer gets stuck and wants additional support.
- Share customer success data across the organization with dashboards and reporting. The CS team now has a real-time understanding of monthly and quarterly revenue projections and can easily share that data with the wider company. “Getting visibility into our entire customer base, not just for our team and managers, but for senior leadership as well has been really valuable,” said Cori.
The Impact
The Cin7 CS team saw dramatic improvements with their new digital strategy.
With the help of ChurnZero’s automation and the Cin7 CS team’s tactical approach, the company reduced churn by 60% quarter over quarter.
Analyzing usage insights and deploying a digital strategy have also made them more strategic in their focus. “We use our people’s time very efficiently in the areas where we know there is the biggest impact,” said Ryan, “as opposed to having our team spread thin across all these different initiatives.”
For the Cin7 CS team, partnering with ChurnZero has been about building a foundation that will take them into the new digital age of customer success.
As for what’s next for the team, now that they’ve proven out their digital-first approach for driving adoption and retention, they plan on diving deeper into using ChurnZero to identify and digitally engage customers who are primed for expansion opportunities. They look forward to exploring the potential of using a digital expansion strategy to increase the lifetime value of their customers.
