Customer Success Operations

A renewal date tells you what already happened.

The customer decision was made much earlier, frequently before any money changed hands, and it degraded through every touch point in between.

By the renewal date it is a recording rather than a measurement.

A business that measures only at the end holds one data point about a process that had dozens. The instrument that would have caught it is a health reading, numbered and consistently defined, taken at every touch point from first awareness through to advocacy. The author has implemented it repeatedly and, across twenty years and businesses from startups to ten figures, has never once found a business already doing it.

And it fails wherever it is not paid for. The number that keeps a customer is the number with nothing attached to it.

• A health reading anchored on outcomes rather than on opinions
• Two questions that would have prevented the case in chapter one
• The randomised experiment in which a genuinely helpful phone call moved churn from 6.4 percent to 10.0
• Why four widely quoted retention statistics do not survive contact with their own sources
• A page listing what was cut during the writing, and why

Chapter 13 presents randomised field evidence that acting on a high risk score is frequently ineffective and can cause the churn it was meant to prevent. It is conceded rather than rebutted, and it is the part of the book most worth reading.