Effective Risk Management in Customer Success Part I

Hi, I’m Markus, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my newsletter. I help you to deliver, grow, and monetize customer value to improve your performance, accelerate your career, and build a profitable SaaS business.

---

There’s not a single SaaS company that can afford to lose customers to churn. 

Customer Success teams need to implement effective risk management frameworks to detect avoidable churn as early as possible.

Put simply, avoidable churn involves all the services you are providing to customers aka customer success (education and training) as well as customer support

Everything related to the product design and the customer fit is non-avoidable.

Of course, from a global perspective, it’s anything but non-avoidable.

It’s just that you can’t avoid it anymore after the purchase.

The appropriate solution is to stop acquiring those customers in the first place.

Here’s how to build your framework:

---

1. Identifying risks

Too many CS teams follow the “standard protocol” and build their risk management frameworks on superficial data.

NPS, CSAT, Health Scores, Product Usage, and Feature Adoption are easy to measure.

But they are not telling the whole story.

• It’s easy to identify a churn risk when customers are not using the product

• It's easy to identify a churn risk when customers give you low ratings.

• It's easy to identify a churn risk when customers are only using a small fracture of the product.

But what if it is not obvious?