As Tom Peters once said, a sale momentarily weds a company and a customer. The length of the post-sale marriage, if you will, depends on many factors that fall outside the control of a salesperson. Up until the time of product or service usage by a customer, a salesperson is able to control for the typical stages of a customer lifecycle—awareness, engagement, conversion, trial – that precede a hand-off to a customer service or account management team. What do some companies do well that mitigate customer attrition and fall-off? What are the best practices in the hand-off from sales to service? Recent studies of customer churn at Saas companies spotlighted three major causes of churn:
• Poor onboarding (the top factor)
• Underperforming product
• Ineffective relationship building
At Ad.net, we are heavily focused on continuously improving our processes and customer management to maintain our retention rate as high as it can be. What do we do to solve for the top reasons causing customer churn among ad tech platforms and similar Saas solutions? We are focused on:
• Simplifying the tasks required of our customers. We keep the time commitment and learning curve to a minimum
• Testing small and gaining a level of efficiency before scaling. We don’t over-extend in the first month of a campaign. Advertisers call it a test for a reason.
• Customizing the level of service and over-communicating. We let you have it any way you want, whether it’s daily reports or once-a-week conference calls.
• Performing. When it’s an agency and their client as part of the relationship, we understand that our performance is your performance.
This focus drives our Account Management team and our interaction not just with our customers (agencies and direct clients) but even with our sales team. In our experience, the better the coordination and relationship between Sales and Account Management, the better the marriage between our company and our customers. For us and for many companies, the new customer onboarding experience is the largest determinant to keeping a customer. We’d like to think we’re on it every day.
