A clear, simple focus on retention.
5%
improvement in overall retention rate
+5%
improvement with Year One customers
20x
return on investment
“We combined old fashioned process and discipline with analytics and automation to improve our retention five percent.” – Steve Shannon, SVP of sales and marketing | Critical Mention
The Challenge
The Critical Mention team was growing fast
Steve Shannon is the SVP of sales and marketing at Critical Mention, the leading global media monitoring platform, and they had plans for a big-growth year. During the year-end planning, Steve and his team placed a sharp focus on their retention efforts. With a large customer base, Steve understood the power of retention and that every point of renewal improvement would take the pressure off the entire company to meet aggressive growth goals. He invested in ChurnZero and worked with his team to take steps to fight churn. His immediate challenges included:
- A talented but young staff that needed direction, data, and processes
- Slow visibility into customer engagement
- An approach to servicing customers that was to reactive
- Mistaking “happy” for “healthy.” Customers may be happy with the CSM and the company, but may not be getting the value they seek from the product.
The Process
Critical Mention partnered with ChurnZero to:
- Establish more defined processes: more regular Business Reviews with customers and monthly internal account reviews.
- Create finer segmentation that led to targeted strategies. There was a specific focus on Year One customers and customers with a larger deal size. The Year One customer focus has led to significant improvement and will have a large and lasting impact.
- Establish regular internal account reviews and added objective metrics (such as health scores) to the conversation.
- Use targeted communication and automation to drive feature adoption.
The Impact
In the first nine months, Critical Mention has seen:
-
5% improvement in overall retention rate
-
An even bigger improvement with Year 1 customers
-
20x ROI, their out-of-pocket investments include content updates and ChurnZero