MyShopManager reduces monthly paid subscription logo churn by 28%
MyShopManager.com is a website for independent auto repair shops that helps customers gain a better view of business, automate marketing, and improve customer retention. The company employs a product-led growth strategy with a free trial leading to a monthly paid contract that customers can cancel at any time.65%
reduction in average trial onboarding time
95%
decrease in paid subscription churn post-onboarding
40%
increase in the number of customers per CSM
“Before ChurnZero, it was impossible to track if a customer was interested in an additional service. Now, we can track those opportunities and we know exactly when to convert them.”
Chelsea Reece, director of operations and enablement | MyShopManager
The Challenge
While a free trial model excels at attracting customers, it can make churn rates volatile and difficult to forecast.
With MyShopManager growing rapidly, its Customer Success team needed to overhaul a disconnected and prolonged process for converting free trials into paying customers. Each CSM owned 250+ accounts, a number that increased by the day. With little visibility into the customer journey or product usage, the team found it hard to identify when to present upgrade offers, address risks, or facilitate handoffs. A significant number of paid customers churned during the onboarding to post-onboarding transition due to the length of time it took to introduce new CSMs.
“We were reactive and running blind,” said Chelsea Reece, director of operations and enablement at MyShopManager. By the time CSMs knew there was a problem, they were too late.
While the team had created a basic health score in their CRM, it could only capture lagging indicators. It flagged the obvious; it did not flag the issues leading up to what became the obvious.
The team needed a tech-touch model to create a scalable, proactive customer experience. After considering an in-house build and deciding that the investment and the time required to develop a viable platform wasn’t feasible, they partnered with ChurnZero.
The Process
With ChurnZero, MyShopManager can do the following:
- Create smoother trial-to-paid customer transitions. The team used a ChurnZero Play with an In-App Announcement to notify customers when they transitioned from working with an onboarding specialist to a CSM. This workflow also queues an introductory email from the CSM to send to the customer the following day. “The digital touchpoints make it a quicker and more natural progression for the customer,” says Chelsea.
- Mitigate churn risks in customer transitions. To standardize customer transitions, the team created an onboarding Journey with defined processes that set expectations and prepared customers for their post-onboarding relationship. MyShopManager’s Journey prompts CSMs to review trial customers for red flags that would impede their success. This step reduces churn by surfacing opportunities to nurture at-risk customers and pause the transition until their health improves.
- Flag and address usage changes. ChurnZero’s event tracking alerts the MyShopManager team to significant usage events such as a customer turning off a campaign, which signals an engagement decline.
- Track and manage the expansion pipeline. ChurnZero’s reports and usage data help the team identify and operationalize upsell opportunities across the customer journey.
- Make business reviews more strategic. The team created and automated an adoption Journey to enhance the structure and cadence of their business review process. ChurnZero helps them ground each call in usage data and insights, elevating the customer’s experience from a check-in to a strategic consultation.
- Make customer support data accessible. MyShopManager integrated their support system (Jira Service Desk) with ChurnZero, enabling CSMs to view support tickets and create segments and alerts based on them. Their support team also benefits from being able to access CS data, such as renewal dates and health scores, directly from JIRA.
- Equip the product team with new customer insights. With the ability to segment customers by key attributes and behavior, the CS team can now define their ideal customer profile. MyShopManager’s product team also uses this data to guide their customer research and roadmap strategy.
- Solve challenges across the business. The trial-to-paid journey has a few events that overlap and blend. ChurnZero’s Live Exports, which automate report creation and distribution, has shed visibility into murky customer statuses. “Everyone gets notified. It’s been phenomenal to work cross-functionally and collaboratively,” says Chelsea.
The Impact
In one year, MyShopManager has seen the following results:
- Increased prorate conversion from 25% to 60%. MyShopManager prorates monthly contracts based on a customer’s trial end date. They improved their prorate conversion by reducing the amount of time it takes trial users to convert to a paid subscription. Cohort and event reports allow the team to identify the traits and behavior of best-fit customers who convert the most often and target outreach. “ChurnZero has given us a level of visibility into trial customers that we’ve never had before,” says Chelsea.
- 65% reduction in average trial onboarding time.
- 95% decrease in paid subscription churn during the period immediately after onboarding. Using Plays and Journeys to accelerate the introduction of CSMs and time to value for paid customers has nearly eliminated post-onboarding cancelations.
- 28% decrease in monthly paid subscription logo churn. The team’s new ability to flag negative behavior sooner has stabilized paid retention. “We had no idea what to expect in any given month,” says Chelsea. “Now, we don’t have many surprises.”
- 40% increase in the number of customers per CSM. ChurnZero’s automation enabled the team to adopt a tech-touch model, managing more customers and reducing churn without adding headcount.
- Refined the ideal customer profile. Being able to track and access customer insights has reduced tension over customer fit between the post-sales team and their sales and product counterparts. With the data to validate churn reasons and trends, CSMs can advise and influence the sales model and product roadmap.
- Tightened support and success transitions. The integration of systems avoids situations where support reps on customer calls don’t know about the customer’s last interaction with CS, and vice versa. “We’ve seen a drastic improvement in on our communication with support and in the transparency of existing support issues and tickets,” says Chelsea.
