A big account has gone quiet and I think they are going to churn. What do I actually do?

Written in a real downturn, so the save tactics are the practical ones: payment deferrals, pause instead of cancel, temporary access. The playbook holds up any time a customer's budget disappears.

Customer Success Strategies to Tackle COVID Successfully

From Chargebee by Smuruthi Kesavan 8 min read

• Raising retention 5 percent lifts profits 25 to 95 percent, and reacquiring the same customer costs about 10x more.
• Chargebee's data showed churn is materially lower on long-term contracts than on month-to-month ones.
• Written mid-COVID: sort your base by whether the shock helped them (video, e-signature) or hurt them (events, travel).

The single most common cause of a surprise churn, handled step by step, including the 48 hour window for reaching the new contact and the 'you, we, me' meeting structure.

Did your customer champion leave? Use this five-step playbook to reduce churn risk

From ChurnZero by Emily Nesterick 9 min read

• When a customer champion leaves, there is a 51 percent chance the account churns within 12 months.
• 65 percent of accounts that see an executive change do not renew their SaaS contract.
• Acting inside the first 48 hours makes that customer 33 percent more likely to renew.
• Only about half of customer success teams have a play for a key contact leaving.

The most complete breakdown of what goes into a health score: which four to six categories to weight, how to segment scores by journey stage, and the failure modes (too many metrics, too much subjective input).

Customer Health Score Explained: Metrics, Models and Tools

From Gainsight 12 min read

• Sample health score weighting: usage 40 percent, support trends 25 percent, sentiment 20 percent, executive engagement 15 percent.
• Score bands used to triage accounts: 71 to 100 healthy, 31 to 70 at risk, 0 to 30 critical.
• 78 percent of customers say personalisation makes them more likely to buy again (McKinsey, 2021).

The ten strategies are sequenced the way you would actually run a churn programme: instrument, classify reasons, segment by whether you can influence it, then offer something reason-specific.

Best Proven Strategies To Reduce Customer Churn

From Chargebee by Nupura Ughade and Arijit Bose 14 min read

• Between 15 and 30 percent of customers leave for reasons that are within your control.
• Analyse churn on 4W: who churned, why (voluntary or involuntary), when in the lifecycle, and where.
• SaaS churn averages around 5 percent, and 5 to 20 percent of cancelling customers accept a retention offer.

Six minutes on reading the early warning signs of an account going quiet and what the intervention looks like. Useful when you already suspect a big account is drifting and need a plan today, not a framework.

How to Reduce SaaS Churn by Identifying At-Risk Customers Early

On CSM Practice 6 min