How a Growing SaaS Company Increases Customer Motivation and Output During Implementation

IntelAgree is a growing AI-powered contract management SaaS company that enables legal teams to do impactful work. As relatively new functions, IntelAgree’s Customer Success and Professional Services/Implementation teams found themselves:

• Losing customer momentum during implementation. As customers juggle competing priorities with hands-on and task-driven implementation work, their enthusiastic drive often stalls—and in turn, timelines get delayed.
• Delivering guidance largely based on customer anecdotes. Without visibility into product usage, the teams’ guidance for customer project leads is based solely on the project lead’s feedback. Reliance on customer feedback to inform the team about a pilot’s progress often proved inaccurate or inadequate.
• Using multiple spreadsheets on a shared drive to track a customer post-sale. With CRMs, product usage ends as soon as the sale is done. IntelAgree needed a centralized tool that was designed to manage the client through their entire journey as a paying customer.
• Expending substantial time and effort creating progress reports. Manually aggregating and formatting data for internal and external customer journey reporting was a time-intensive labor, especially when fulfilling ad-hoc leadership requests with a quick turnaround.

What led IntelAgree to partner with ChurnZero?

At the beginning of their search, IntelAgree looked at 20 different products. Initially, the team wanted a tool to track customer data. They viewed customer health scoring as a nice-to-have. It wasn’t until they dove in and started using the platform that the real power and importance of the tool came to light.

Journeys and event tracking ultimately led IntelAgree to select ChurnZero over other products. Now integral to the teams’ daily operations, they describe their newfound attachment: “Let’s just say, we’d never want to part with those features.”

What did IntelAgree do?

IntelAgree partnered with ChurnZero to streamline the teams’ operations and give them the power to:

• Automate customer engagement and internal tasks. ChurnZero templated Plays help IntelAgree maintain a consistent voice and message across customer accounts and touchpoints. “I don’t have time to spend five minutes crafting an e-mail, so I use Plays,” said Matthew Miller, head of Customer Success at IntelAgree. “They’re in my queue, waiting for me to review and send. They’re a lifesaver. They guarantee nothing falls off my radar.”
• Say goodbye to overly detailed project plans and weekly status meetings. The team now automates customer-facing journey status reports using ChurnZero to share directly with customers. The reports show customers exactly what they’ve done so far, what’s expected of them next, and where they stand against plan.
• Validate customer pilots and testing. IntelAgree couples External Journey Reports with product usage data to send more targeted customer guidance. The team advises customers as to whether they’re truly ready to go live based on product events, mastery, and comfort.
• Standardize Customer Success workflows. Using ChurnZero automation, the team established consistency across their messaging and processes to ensure their operations were formulaic and repeatable as they built their customer journey. “Knowing that customer health is our driving force,” said Matthew, “we didn’t wait to purchase until we needed to scale.”

What were the results?

Within four months of launching ChurnZero, IntelAgree was able to:

• Increase customer product usage during onboarding. Empowered with usage data, customer champions can directly address challenges and help team laggards.  The team can now quickly and accurately determine a customer’s product proficiency and whether they’ve attempted to complete specific tasks.
• Create a new self-service implementation offering. Using External Journey Reports, the team is building a new, more feasible implementation tier called Launch Pad, where they place select implementation capabilities in their clients’ hands.
• Deliver instant insights for leadership without a reliance on Customer Success. Instead of creating status reports each week, the team now shares a dashboard showing ChurnScores and product usage with leadership. Dashboards prioritize customer discussions and allow executives to make better, more rapid business.
• Keep customer momentum alive post sale. To ensure customers stay engaged, IntelAgree drips training material to customers at optimal points along their journey using Plays. “We automate a Play to send a terminology sheet before a customer’s first configuration call,” said Kyle Myers, director of professional services at IntelAgree. “This ensures when we have the meeting, we’re all speaking the same language. Then, before a key testing checkpoint, we send training videos to familiarize the customer with the product.”
• Provide a consistent customer and employee onboarding experience. Journeys and Plays standardize the teams’ daily work, define clear roles and responsibilities, and ensure recurring, effective action. Journeys also promote process uniformity for the teams’ internal employee onboarding. Knowing the expectations of a journey drives consistent communication, particularly for their youngest and newest team members.
• Begin building a business case for investors. Showing IntelAgree’s maturity as well as customer data—including customer usage, value, and happiness—will be extremely useful to grow the company’s business case and story of why other venture capital firms should invest in them.