Churn Monster: Unlucky

Today is Friday the 13^th and we all know that means – bad luck, right? Well ironically you are in luck, because in honor of this cursed day, we are releasing a new monster in our churn monster series.

An unlucky churn monster is a customer who bought your product with the best of intentions of being successful in utilizing and adopting it but along the way they have been hit with misfortune and adversity making the likelihood of success much harder.

Let’s take a look at a scenario involving an unlucky churn monster and see what you can do as a Customer Success Manger in this type of situation.

The Scenario

You have an introductory call with one of your new customers. They seem like a great fit and are excited to get things going with implementing and rolling out your product. A few months have gone by and you are shocked by the amount of curveballs that have been thrown in the mix since your first welcome call.

It all started with your main POC’s computer crashing, causing them to lose all of the work they had put into filling out the configuration worksheets. That accounted for hours of lost work and created a significant delay in getting those completed and turned over so the configuration process could begin.

Then the day that was chosen to do the data migration from their previous system to your product certainly didn’t happen as planned. There were major outages that day with the other system that made it impossible to pull the data out for import into your platform. The team felt it was necessary to wait to fully understand how their data might have been affected by the outage, which again delayed the deployment process.

And most recently, the week you had planned to do the team onboarding training, had to be canceled because 2/3 of the team had caught the same stomach bug and were out sick.

No matter how hard you’ve been trying to make this customer successful, you’ve been met with obstacles time and time again. You are starting to worry that this customer is cursed and might just give up. What do you do?

Plan of Action

First you start by letting the customer know you are a partner on their side to help get them through all of these unforeseen roadblocks. You also share in a laugh together about just how unlucky they have been, which helps to add levity to the situation.

You also plan to reschedule the onboarding training for two weeks out when hopefully everyone will be back in good health. Furthermore, instead of this being a virtual training you decide to make this an onsite visit to help make it more personal and make sure the team prioritizes this training and uses it as an opportunity to work through some of their use cases together.

And lastly you offer a “restart”, where you have added two free months on to the end of their subscription to help make up for all the lost time with the delayed start. This isn’t typically something that you offer clients, especially if a delay is due to laziness, but you feel like in this case it will be taken as an act of goodwill since they really are eager to get things going and could use the extra time to prove their success.

Fast-forward a few months, and it’s renewal time. You are confident that the customer is in a much better place now and seems to have fended off the initial bad luck. And it turns out you are right. They not only want to renew but what to expand on their subscription with you.

Good job of turning that unlucky churn monster into a happy, successful customer.

Follow the links below to check out the other churn monsters that were previous part of our series.

• Churn Monster #1 – Disengaged Customer
• Churn Monster #2 – Cash-Strapped Customer
• Churn Monster #3 – Slacker Customer
• Churn Monster #4 – The Victim Customer
• Churn Monster #5 – Manic Customer
• Churn Monster #6 – Abandoned Customer
• Churn Monster #7 – Stuck Customer
• Churn Monster #8 – Ghosted Customer
• Churn Monster #9 – Cheater Customer
• Churn Monster #10 – Bad Fit Customer
• Churn Monster #11 – Acquired Customer
• Churn Monster #12 – Championless Customer
  
  

To learn more about the churn monsters that might be in your closet, download our churn monster playbook, which can be your definitive guide in fighting customer churn.

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Customer Success Around the Web

• What Product Teams Need from Customer Success– Find out product teams need to know, and how as a CSM you can help them.
• How to Create Effective Customer Success Teams –  Take a look at a few ways you can build an excellent CS team.
• Aligning Your Organization Around Customer Success  – Learn how to make sure your expertise is channelled into work that you know results in customer success, rather than work that you just think is great