Saas Client Case Study
Case Study Overview
My client, a SaaS solution, had experienced unprecedented churn in their business for the 3 months prior to my arrival. This company had been an acquisition engine throughout 2020-2021. However, as their churn started to increase and their acquisition slowed, they realized the need to adapt their business model for current and future growth.
As part of my onboarding with my client, I performed a discovery exercise where I investigated all aspects of their operating model (sales, marketing, operations, finance, billing) to identify those key growth opportunities. From there I developed a high-level action plan, reviewed it with my client, and aligned on the key areas to focus my efforts first. This alignment is critical, as this collaborative effort with my client prioritized my focus and efforts so that I could maximize my impact for their business.
The highlight of my engagement was my identification of a key consumer growth opportunity (renewal) that impacted both acquisition and churn, and the corresponding business case approval to scale an initiative. I validated a key activity within this renewal behavior that had the potential to drive significant monthly growth. By analyzing a pre-existing in-market sales tactical test (outbound telemarketing), I developed a financially driven business proposal to scale the outbound tactic to maximum capacity. The business case was approved.
After one month in market at full scale, this telemarketing initiative delivered a 5ppt (percentage point) improvement in renewal rate delivering $400k incremental recurring monthly revenue (with the value of each 1ppt improvement worth approximately $80k monthly recurring revenue).
The following includes a comprehensive overview of the solutions, results, and leadership impact from my client engagement.
Cross-Functional Data Literacy and Reporting Evolution:
As part of my discovery phase, I gained access to their reporting repository (Tableau). The goal of this exercise follows:
Assess the holistic reporting infrastructure and data quality
Identify immediate insights from their existing reporting that could be quickly transitioned into quick win strategies to support their immediate in-quarter growth
Document all reporting gaps (with business justification for need to build reporting)
As I started evaluating the 80+ reports in Tableau, I also interviewed executive leaders, middle managers, and practitioners. My findings included:
Although there were multiple reports that showed components of business performance on a daily basis, there was not a single report that told “the holistic story” of business performance on a monthly basis
Business performance was shared via email on a daily basis by a single resource. However, trying to replicate that number in Tableau was challenging for middle managers/practitioners
The reporting itself was static (a point in time), and did not provide trends nor end-of-month projections to equip leaders to strategically react to in-month trends
The immediate challenge for my client was one of data literacy and visualization. Although they had great source data, the execution of the information (via email) was only sent to a select audience. The impact to the team? A simple inquiry from executives to their teams turned into a multi-day exercise taking them away from their day job.
Why? The team could not simply replicate that number found in the email to a Tableau report. This would trigger multiple meetings across multiple departments to identify where the number can be found in Tableau, understand what the number means, and evaluate the report to answer the question from the executive team.
Based off these findings, I led a small cross-functional team (Reporting, Finance, Marketing, and Sales) to understand the most critical data they need to run their business, evaluate their go-to reports, and understand their wish-list. From there I partnered with the internal reporting team and created multiple solutions for their organizations
Solution Overview: Aligned organization to new analytical insights and developed new actionable reports to drive business performance
Solution 1: Built same-month churn trend/cancel forecast reporting capabilities from existing daily cancel reports.
The Result: By the 8th day of the month, I was able to identify the final churn rate/operational cancel performance with less than a 2% error rate.
Leadership Lens: Leaders were equipped with critical insights into their in-month business performance, able to evaluate holistic strategy, and adapt their strategy (if necessary) to meet month end/quarterly net growth goals.
Solution 2: Synthesized 80+ existing reports in Tableau and developed 5 new actionable reports (churn indicators and performance) across various areas of the business. This included a weekly executive/middle management readout to explain the numbers, insights, and trends to increase data literacy.
The Result: Alignment across all teams to understand WHERE churn was occurring (controllable vs. non-controllable), WHEN during the customer lifecycle, and HOW (via what cancel channel)
Leadership Lens: When questions arose from executive leaders, the team had business and data fluency to deliver a confident response in hours instead of days.
Solution 3 : Developed month-end net gain trend reporting across their different business units (Acquisition growth, Cancel impact, Net gain)
The Result: A single (yet impactful) preview into how the business generates revenue across their acquisition and churn performance
Leadership Lens: For the first time, leaders across the company could see the slowing of their acquisition business, the acceleration of churn, and the corresponding impact to their overall revenue growth from a net gain perspective. This articulated the impact of churn and the need to invest focus across churn reduction initiatives across the entire organization.
Consumer Intelligence- Cancellation Journey Insights Overview
After revamping their reporting infrastructure specific to churn-related activities, the next step was to understand consumer intent for leaving their subscription. The organization had an existing set of cancel reason codes (71 total) that were used at the consumer point of cancellation.
By analyzing the historical trends of the codes, investigating the customer cancel experience, and performing interviews with the key stakeholders/owners of the cancel process, I learned the following:
There was an inconsistent understanding of the purpose of the codes and how/when they should be used
The online customer cancel journey was a cumbersome process, with a customer needing to follow an internally (and biased) multi-step process for delivering their cancel code reason
20% of the codes were used 80% of the time, with leaders across the organization most interested in the 80% that were minimally used
After identifying these insights, I worked collaboratively across different teams to build a new insight-focused customer cancellation journey. This multi-touch cancellation journey included defined roles/responsibilities for each tactic, how the results of the tactics/insights should be used by the organization, and the physical launch/execution of the program.
My goal with this holistic journey was to capture key trend information that could be leveraged on a weekly/monthly basis, while achieving deeper, personal insights from the former customer.
Solution Overview: Developed multi-touch program focused on critical information captured at point of subscription cancel activity
The Result: Richer insight into why their customer left the service, key demographic details about the customer, and an understanding of who the customer chose as their new service provider (competitive intelligence)
Leadership Lens: Actionable data and insights that could not have been captured within the existing data and reporting infrastructure
Cancellation Journey: Disconnect cancel code simplification (Part 1)
The first part of this new cancel journey focused on the “point of cancel” reason code simplification project. I evaluated the three-year trend of the 71 existing cancel codes that were being used by the company.
Through a discovery process with a cross-functional team, I was able to simplify the cancel code reasons down to 21 total codes. This included a mix of maintaining some of the legacy codes, retiring a group of codes, and launching a set of new codes.
In addition to the reduction of the number of codes, I also simplified the cancel reason code experience for the consumer across all channels from a 2-step process to 1-step process. There were three key benefits to this specific effort:
It established clear roles/definitions for both internal and external customers of the reason codes (a simple “why” they are leaving).
It eliminated any internal bias caused by the cancel process.
It provided my client a clean data set for analysis.
Finally, I rebuilt the organizations visualization of cancel code reporting. This revamp of their reporting provided insights into current month trends, seasonal trends, and YoY trends.
Solution 1: Disconnect cancel code simplification
· The Result: 70% reduction in cancel codes, evolved reporting to weekly/monthly trends vs. daily updates
· Leadership Lens: The cancel codes’ purpose evolved from “the definitive source of truth” of cancel behavior to a “view into consumer trends” at-the-moment of cancel activity
Cancellation Journey: Post cancel survey (Part 2):
After addressing the immediate need to simplify and enhance the cancel code ecosystem at the point of cancel, there was still opportunity to gain richer insights from their former customers. The leadership team had heard anecdotal feedback regarding their customers and their reasons for leaving the service (front line teams/social listening), but there was not a quantifiable way to validate this chatter.
Additionally, policy and data limitations left gaps around understanding critical information about the customers, the customer’s business, and the equipment they use. Knowing this type of information would help establish their future product and customer experience roadmap to meet their customers’ needs.
Finally, there was a gap in competitive intelligence. While there were several competitors in their industry with similar product suites, there was a recent emergence of several new “free” product offerings. While my clients knew this threat existed, again they were unable to quantify the potential risk.
Given this gap in consumer insights, I developed a post cancellation survey, orchestrated the process to execute the survey, and provided weekly analytical insights. This survey, executed 2 days after the cancellation activity, included both scripted multiple-choice questions and verbatim customer rebuttals to specific, open-ended questions.
Solution 2: Post-cancel survey
The Result: 10%+ response rate (with 80% of respondents providing verbatim details). I leveraged existing survey tools and functionality to limit expense exposure.
Leadership Lens: Executive and middle management leaders identified new insights into customer owned business operations (that were not available in existing data), validated frontline feedback into the impact of the free product competitive offering, and acquired rich verbatim insights that were used to align other business units on roadmap prioritization
Identifying the best tactic to drive subscriber and revenue growth
As I explored deeper and refined their existing analytics to find those key moments of growth opportunity, I identified a specific customer behavior (renewal) that was a catalyst for not only churn, but also their monthly acquisition growth.
While renewal behavior was known inside the organization, the level of impact it had on their monthly subscription business performance was significant. From my exploration, a sub-component of the renewal experience, same-month renewal, showed significant upside to their monthly churn performance that was actionable and could be impacted by traditional sales tactics.
As a small tactical test leveraging Outbound Telemarketing was placed in market, I evaluated 2+ years of same-month renewal activity. My goal was to understand how that consumer behavior (renewal) changed as different policies, procedures, and marketing tactics evolved.
After reviewing the historical trends and the early results (1.5 months of telemarketing activity), I connected the dots that, given the current state of their policies and business operations, outbound telemarketing could have a significant impact to their monthly performance if scaled.
I developed a business case to expand and scale outbound telemarketing, modeled various assumptions (low, mid, high) to help the organization understand the potential impact, and articulated both the monthly churn reduction impact and corresponding improved revenue generated from this tactic. Based off this model, the company accepted my proposal.
Solution Overview: Identified key consumer growth opportunity (renewal) that impacted both acquisition and churn, validated key activity within renewal behavior that drove significant monthly growth, analyzed in-market sales tactical test (outbound telemarketing), developed financially driven business case to scale outbound tactic to maximum capacity, and received approval to scale
The Results: In the first 30 days at full scale of Outbound Telemarketing, the organization experienced an immediate 5ppt (percentage point) improvement in renewal rate, with the value of each 1ppt improvement worth approximately $80k monthly recurring revenue.
Leadership Lens: The leaders identified a key driver of growth. They now have the ability to improve the efficiency of the tactic with their sales teams, to test additional tactics to improve overall growth performance (increase investment), or to optimize their overall tactical spend portfolio to achieve the right balance of investment vs. impact.
Customer Experience Evolution: Strategy and Actionable Roadmap
My client was very focused on driving the business and managing the day-to-day operations to hit their monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. Through my discovery work and revamping their analytical insights into their business, I understood their business challenges with declining acquisition growth (driven by high market penetration) and the core elements of the who, what, where, when, and why of churn with great consumer insights.
At this point, I developed a customer experience evolution for my client. This strategic framework and roadmap focused on nurturing the customer through the multiple phases of the customer lifecycle: Awareness, Buy, Onboard, Learn, Use/Engage, Help/Service, Bill/Pay, Upgrade/Grow, Retain/Leave, Renew. I partnered with my executive client leader to develop (cont.) aspirational vision statements for a multi-year plan to evolve the company from an acquisition engine to a holistic, customer-centric solution to the customer needs.
Beyond the strategic framework I developed a comprehensive 360-degree action plan that articulated specific pain points throughout the customer journey. These pain-points not only addressed the external customer but also the internal employee through the lens of policy, procedure, and systems. For each pain-point, I identified specific actions/needs to help address these issues. These pain-points touched all facets of the business: Finance, IT, Reporting, Product, Sales, Marketing, Online, Customer Service, and Billing.
The 360-degree plan included short-term wins (0-6 months), mid-term opportunities (7-12 month opportunities), and long-term goals (12+ months). Knowing that there were many quick win initiatives available (each with varying degrees of level of effort/level of impact), I built financial models that connected the operation improvement of each initiative to projected revenue impact. These models were used to identify the optimal business cases for prioritization within the organization.
Solution (Overview): Strategic Framework and 360-degree Customer action plan, inclusive of financially modeled subscriber and revenue opportunity
The Result: My client had an actionable plan that delivered short-term, quantifiable results for their business while having a multi-year roadmap of operational initiatives that would improve the internal and external customer experience.
Leadership Lens: Executives have vision for the multi-year transformation journey of the organization, inclusive of an actionable roadmap with projected revenue impacts.
At the conclusion of this engagement, I delivered to my client five key actionable reports that delivered key insights into their business to drive their monthly performance, a data-driven sales tactic that was returning improved subscriber performance and monthly recurring revenue, a tactical customer journey that was delivering key insights that were not readily available from their existing reporting capabilities, and a strategic roadmap for their customer experience transformation.