Reducing Customer Churn with Pawan Deshpande

Pawan Deshpande is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, and
a Head of Product & Growth at Linea. He has founded multiple
successful companies, including Curata, a content marketing and
analytics software company. Pawan has extensive experience in
customer success and has implemented a critical care framework to
improve customer retention and satisfaction.


Pawan shares his experience with customer success and introduces
the concept of critical care, a proactive approach to customer
support. He discusses the four distinct ways companies handle
customer success: reactive support, onboarding, business reviews,
and critical care. Pawan emphasizes the importance of a culture
of ownership within the customer success team and the need for
proactive monitoring of customer health. He also highlights the
role of instrumentation and telemetry in detecting issues and
setting appropriate thresholds. Pawan concludes by discussing the
mindset shift required for effective customer success and the
potential for upselling within the customer success role.


HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT
[00:05:11] Discussion of the challenges faced by Curata and the
need for a culture change
[00:07:28] The importance of breaking down silos between customer
success, sales, and product/engineering teams
[00:09:00] Creating collaboration between customer success and
sales through pod structures
[00:10:36] Outcome-oriented goal setting for customer success
teams
[00:11:01] Reactive support is like urgent care for
customers
[00:16:58] Building instrumentation and telemetry into the
product is important
[00:31:04] Importance of setting up thresholds for customer
intervention
[00:38:21] Incentivizing customer success team through variable
compensation
[00:41:42] Customer success is more important than sales for
sustaining a business
[00:46:30] Client success should be involved in upsells, but may
need partnership


ADDITIONAL RESOURCES


Learn more about Pawan Deshpande:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pawandeshpande/
How to Make QBRs Valuable for Your Customers:
https://forc.mx/3s1Q3Jz
Become a Must-Have Solution for Customers in Any Economy:
https://forc.mx/45ZRo1z


HIGHLIGHT QUOTES


[00:06:36] So what I did is I pulled my desk into the customer
success room. And it was really eye-opening when I pulled up a
desk in there and I would just work out of there and hear the
conversations. What I really heard was a culture of futility. -
Pawan Deshpande
[00:10:18] And that's like the impetus for critical care. That
was one of the key instrumentations we had was detecting if
someone hasn't used the product for 14 days, then we kind of
swarmed the customer and tried to revive the account. - Pawan
Deshpande
[00:22:37] And just on the usage, you know, that was particular
to us and not all companies are like that. Our product is more
like a gym membership. If you don't go to the gym every day,
you're probably not going to show up ever again. - Pawan
Deshpande