Prevent Churn & Drive Expansion

Customer Success (CS) teams can use people signals to stay ahead of potential churn risks and uncover expansion opportunities within existing accounts. This playbook provides an end-to-end strategy for leveraging signals to strengthen relationships, retain customers, and grow revenue.

Understand People Signals

People signals help identify shifts in your customers' organizational structure that impact your solution’s adoption or relationship. These include:

Past Champion Joins the Account

Expansion Opportunity: Champions are familiar with and trust your solution, making them natural allies to advocate for new use cases, increasing adoption, or expansion opportunities.

Past Champion Leaves the Account

Churn Risk: Losing a key advocate creates a gap in buy-in and familiarity. New stakeholders may deprioritize your solution if relationships aren’t maintained.

New Hire or Promotion Within the Account

Expansion Opportunity: New leaders often have budgets and priorities that align with your solution, enabling expansion conversations.

OR

Churn Risk: New decision-makers may not know or trust your technology or may bring a preference for different tools.

Set up actionable alerts for Customer Success 

Set up a workflow that sends  alerts in either email or Slack  for new hires, promotions, or champion departures to prompt timely action by the CS team. Its’ best to have a recommended action 

Here are some examples of how that could look:

Past Champion Joins the Account: Drive Expansion

Actions:

• Send slack message to alert CSM of new potential stakeholder
• Send a congratulatory email acknowledging their new role.
• Schedule a check-in to discuss how you’ve already been helping their team and invite them to the next meeting
• Highlight past successes and explore potential expansion opportunities.

Past Champion Leaves the Account: Multi-Thread to Prevent Churn

Actions: 

• Send slack message to alert CSM of champion’s departure
• Use Multi-thread signal to Identify other influencers and decision-makers within the account.

Example Notification:

Example email:

New Hire or Promotion Within the Account: Prevent Churn or Drive Expansion

Actions:

• Send slack message to alert CSM of new potential stakeholder
• Congratulate them on their new role and introduce yourself.]
• Offer a tailored onboarding session to familiarize them with the value your solution provides.
• Share customer success stories or metrics relevant to their role to build confidence in your solution.

Example notification:

Example Email:

Set Up This Playbook in UserGems:

1. Create an Audience of "Current Customers"
2. Select signals that you want
3. Create a "Customer Success" workflow
4. Create Slack or Email notifications
5. Create Slack Action or template for CSMs
6. Save

Additional Resources

• Prevent Churn and Drive Expansion: Lessons for Customer Success Teams