Customer Retention in Product-Led Growth: Blending Product Usage, Revenue, and Support Data
Customer Retention in Product-Led Growth: Blending Product Usage, Revenue, and Support Data
Discover how blending product usage, revenue, and support data enhances customer retention in product-led GTM strategies. A Practical Guide + Template.
Losing customers feels a lot like a bad break-up—it stings because often, it could’ve been avoided. We get that.
In our case- we’re a product-led company, and we spend our days knee-deep in data from the moment someone clicks onto our site, to each customer call, down to every issue raised to the point they make payments and everything after as well. We see patterns and we've come up with a plan to keep our customers around, not just by reacting to problems, but by being proactive when it comes to retention.
Support with Usage & Revenue Impact
Here’s a practical look:
Think about how your customers use your product. The ones logging in daily, using all the key features? They're not just users; your product is a core part of their operations. A hiccup could throw a wrench in their day-to-day—something we aim to avoid at all costs.
List of Unresolved Tickets: We track all open tickets. Long unresolved high-priority tickets? Big alarm bells.
Revenue Impact: Each ticket is tied to a customer. More tickets may mean more problems. We find patterns and fix them. We also look at the revenue at risk tied to each ticket. A high-revenue customer with urgent tickets gets priority to prevent major revenue loss.
Product Usage: We look at our customers’ behaviour on the product. What are we solving for them, their use-case as well as their activity. This is crucial to understand how critical are we in their day to day operations. Highly active users facing issues get utmost priority.
List of Unresolved Tickets
We’re vigilant about tracking every ticket that comes in. It’s not just about counting them—it’s about understanding the urgency. Tickets that have been unresolved for too long set off alarm bells. These are potential crisis points that could escalate into customer departures if not addressed promptly.
Here's also where ticket severity comes in. A high priority ticket is a red flag, indicating a big problem that needs to be addressed on priority.
Every ticket is more than an issue; it's a window into the customer's experience. By linking each ticket directly to a customer profile, we can see patterns emerging. Are there recurring issues for certain users? Are specific problems tied to recent updates or system changes? This linkage helps us diagnose systemic issues that might be affecting multiple customers or pinpoint specific areas where a customer might need more guidance.
Revenue Impact
Understanding the financial weight of each ticket changes how we prioritize. A high-revenue customer facing critical issues isn't just a support ticket; it's a priority that could impact our bottom line. Below, is a chart we use to see not just the number of tickets, but their potential revenue impact. This helps us make calculated decisions on where to allocate our resources most effectively to mitigate risks.
Product Usage
The activation score is a pivotal metric, derived from product usage or behaviour. It quantifies how deeply integrated our service is into each customer's daily operations. A high activation score means a customer isn't just using our product; they're relying on it heavily, making it a critical component of their workflow.
Here’s how the understanding customer activation guides our support strategy:
Early Detection and Support: By monitoring product activation scores, we can identify which customers might be most affected by even minor disruptions. For a customer with a high score, our system can trigger an alert to our support team to conduct a preemptive check, ensuring everything is running smoothly.
Customized Communication: Customers with high activation scores receive more tailored communications. For instance, if an upcoming update might affect features they rely on heavily, we ensure they’re the first to know, along with providing detailed guides on managing these changes.
Priority Issue Resolution: When these customers face issues, their tickets are automatically flagged as high priority due to the potential impact on their operations. Our support team is prompted to respond quicker and with more resources, if necessary.
Feedback Loop for Product Improvement: High activation scores also help us gather focused feedback. Because these users rely heavily on our product, their insights are incredibly valuable for refining features. This feedback is often fast-tracked to our product development teams to help prioritize updates that will benefit our most active users.
A high score indicates high dependency, which, paired with unresolved issues, could spell trouble. This measure helps us preemptively intensify support for our most reliant users, aiming to resolve issues before they even become aware of them.
Helping CSMs Prioritize better
Monitoring our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) gives us insights into both their workload and performance. If a CSM is managing a high volume of high-risk tickets, it might indicate that they need more support or resources. Conversely, it can also highlight the effectiveness of our training programs and support structures. Balancing their workload ensures that no single CSM becomes overwhelmed, maintaining a high level of service across all accounts.
Let’s consider a practical scenario:
CSM A: Handles 30 open tickets with a total revenue at risk of $50,000.
CSM B: Handles 10 open tickets with a total revenue at risk of $100,000.
On the surface, it might seem that CSM A is more burdened. However, CSM B’s tickets represent a higher potential revenue loss.
Therefore, CSM B might need more immediate support to resolve these high-impact issues. Knowing both the number of open tickets and the associated revenue helps in prioritizing which issues to address first. CSMs can focus on resolving tickets that, if left unresolved, could result in substantial revenue loss.
This combined view helps in balancing the workload among CSMs. If one CSM is handling many high-risk tickets, it might indicate they need additional resources or support to manage effectively.
By stitching together these various data points, we don’t just react to problems—we anticipate them. Our approach ensures that our support isn’t just timely but targeted, addressing potential issues before they become critical.
Customer Priority Framework
Every customer is important but in a growing startup where resources are constrained, we need to segment our support efforts by priortization.
We use a simple method to decide who is most in need of urgent support:
High Usage, High Revenue, High Severity: Top of the list. Immediate action needed.
High Usage, Low Revenue, High Severity: Also crucial. They depend heavily on us, so we can’t slack off.
Low Usage, High Revenue, High Severity: Less frequent users but big spenders. We keep them happy.
Low Usage, Low Revenue, High Severity: We address these as we can, ensuring everyone gets good service.
Retention isn’t just on customer success or support; it’s on the whole business.
Think about it this way—every piece of the puzzle from how often someone uses our product, to the revenue they bring in, and how we handle their problems, tells a part of the story. It’s not just about solving issues as they pop up; it’s about understanding and integrating every interaction they have with our product into a broader strategy.
So, here’s how we see it: retention is a team sport. It’s not something you can shove into a corner of the customer success team's office and hope for the best. Everyone from product managers who build roadmaps, to the marketers crafting messages, to the sales folks on the front lines—they’ve all got a stake in this game.
We track how our users engage, how much value they get from us, and how effectively we solve their issues. And we make it everyone’s business to know these numbers because when one of us wins, we all win.
Here’s a template we use, built on Airbook :
