CASE STUDY • COFENSE
Cofense increases retention with standardized strategies and advanced reporting.
Cofense is the original and leading provider of security awareness training and phishing simulation, and offers global enterprise-level advanced email threat detection and remediation solutions.
Increased customer retention
through greater transparency and consistency.
Improved productivity
across the entire team.
More proactive churn management
to detect early warning signs of churn.
“Our entire CX team’s productivity has soared since implementing ChurnZero.”
Amanda Veasman, director, customer experience, Cofense
The Challenge
The wrong tools…
The Cofense customer experience (CX) team faced challenges in standardizing and automating their renewal processes and reporting. “We historically relied on Salesforce as our core system of recordkeeping,” says Zach Lewis, senior practice manager at Cofense. “But, given that the CX team didn’t own this tool, it was not easy to get the attention we needed when it came to adding new fields or automation specific to CX operations.” In addition to trying to adapt to sales tools, the CX team had to work with cumbersome BI systems that made it difficult to track important financial metrics such as net revenue retention (NRR).
The CX team’s limited insight into customer product usage weakened their ability to spot potential churn risks and provide proactive guidance to the sales team, with whom they work closely to ensure a smooth renewal process.
To address these issues, the CX team sought out a customer success platform that offered improved transparency and consistency in managing customer relationships and that fostered teamwork across departments. Their search led them to ChurnZero.
The Process
With the help of ChurnZero, Cofense created solutions to:
Standardize the renewal process. CX team members create a task in ChurnZero for each account in an active renewal period, which forms a segment called the “renewal hot list.” This list organizes accounts by their renewal deadline and churn risk. Each month, CX team members update their notes in this segment to capture recent customer interactions. Every three weeks, CX managers conduct renewal review meetings with their teams, where they examine the list and brainstorm strategies to address churn risks for vulnerable accounts.
Increase visibility into renewal progress and metrics. The team uses ChurnZero’s custom dashboards and Renewal Hub to track renewals. The dashboard displays open opportunities for the quarter, along with the anticipated annual recurring revenue (ARR) and churn risk sentiment for each opportunity. For senior leaders who might not log into ChurnZero every day, the renewal dashboard offers them an easy way to stay in the loop. “The team used to keep their customer notes in separate spreadsheets, kind of all over the place,” says Amanda Veasman, director of customer experience at Cofense. “But now, with ChurnZero, anyone in the team or management can find exactly what they need, all in one spot.” The Cofense team also uses dashboards to guide internal renewal meetings with sales. “If an account executive has a different idea of how the renewal is going, we can quickly pull up the dashboard on ChurnZero,” says Amanda. “It provides a clear, data-driven snapshot of the renewal’s status that helps our teams get on the same page.”
Align CX and sales to deliver a consistent customer experience. Each month, the CX team meets with the sales team to review the renewal hot list, which outlines the potential churn risks. “Before, this level of collaboration wasn’t as effortless or effective, but now, it’s extremely smooth,” says Amanda. “It also helps us present a unified front to our customers. For instance, if a client has already discussed a certain product but isn’t ready to purchase it yet, maybe due to budget constraints, it’s important that both the CX team member and account executive are aware of this. That way, they avoid repeatedly pitching the client the same product too soon, which can lead to frustration.”
Provide proactive and tailored support by monitoring product usage. The CX team uses ChurnZero’s Live Exports feature to deliver weekly reports to the sales team. These updates provide details on overall customer health (sentiment and product usage) for accounts due for renewal in the current quarter, highlighting those at risk of churning and the reason why. “In Salesforce, it’s really hard to see product usage data,” says Amanda. “Thanks to ChurnZero’s Live Exports, our sales team has deeper insight into our product and how customers use it. Now they can spot if an account needs a bit more attention before they send over a renewal quote. It ensures our customers get the most out of their product.”
Get ahead of churn risks.The CX team uses ChurnZero’s Slack chatbot to generate Slack alerts for the sales team when an account’s churn risk increases. The sales team gets instant insight into an account’s health, usage, and sentiment, so they can mitigate potential issues before they escalate. “ChurnZero’s Slack chatbot has simplified how our team collaborates with sales, and it does so with hardly any extra effort from us,” says Zach.
Understand every customer better with a centralized data hub. Before implementing ChurnZero, the CX team had to navigate multiple systems to access customer data and product usage metrics. “It used to take a good 20 minutes just to log into all the different systems to check a customer’s health,” says Amanda. With ChurnZero, CX team members can now better prepare for customer meetings by quickly checking the customer’s recent activity and product usage in ChurnZero before the call. They use this insight to offer more personalized guidance, like suggesting features the customer hasn’t yet used.
The Impact
Using ChurnZero, the Cofense team:
Increased customer retention through greater transparency and consistency in CX operations.
Stronger collaboration between CX and sales teams, leading to more cohesive strategies and unified customer communications.
Enhanced customer insights and reporting. The team has a better understanding of customer engagement, sentiment, churn risk, and team outreach.
More proactive churn management. The CX team and senior leaders have better oversight of at-risk accounts. The company can now detect early warning signs of churn and intervene quickly.
Enhanced productivity of the entire CX organization, from client success and professional services to implementation and technical roles.
Cofense increases customer retention with standardized renewal strategies and advanced reporting
How You Can Start
To find out how you can create a proactive customer health program to reduce churn risk, schedule your demo of ChurnZero today.