Moving beyond NPS—how to use win-loss insights to reduce churn

A few years ago, churn was a bit of an afterthought for many companies. Customers discontinuing usage of parts of your product, solution, or service happened, but most companies focused their attention on new business instead.

Capital was cheap, customers rarely told you “my budget got cut,” and the spotlight on ROI was actually more of a dim flashlight.

The last two years, however, have been the polar opposite.

Almost every company we work with no longer has the luxury of looking at why they win and lose only on the new business side. Instead, they’ve adapted and expanded the reach of their win-loss analysis programs so they can understand why they continue to win and lose their customers.

What drives their current customers to stay?

What drives them to expand?

What drives them to eventually leave?

Understanding why you continue to win and lose—versus why you initially won and lost—is the key to eventually reducing your churn and improving your net retention.

As both a CS leader and a win-loss practitioner, I sit at a unique intersection of these questions. Every business and customer journey is unique, so there’s never going to be one single “right” way of running a win-loss program. But there are several common themes I’ve seen from the programs that have actually understood their churn and been able to rectify it.

Give buyers a microphone, not an NPS number

When NPS was invented by a handful of Bain & Co. partners back in 2003, I doubt they envisioned it becoming the de facto gold standard for the entire customer experience. I’m a former Bain consultant myself and have used it religiously—often in conversations where “What’s your NPS on that?” didn’t need to be brought up—and it absolutely has its place.

But an NPS number is a means to an end, not the end itself. Companies that give their customers a microphone and let them speak openly, candidly, and confidentially (i.e., to a third party) tend to uncover significantly richer insights. Instead of hearing “I’m a 7,” they hear “I’ve actually loved this for a long time, but your UX is falling behind your peers, and I plan on switching in three months.”

If you really want to fix churn, skip the appetizers and get to the main course by letting your buyers speak candidly.

Tie your program to moments of impact in the customer journey

No customer journey is the same. Time-to-value is different. Implementation time is different. You might have multiple products and cross-sell a lot, whereas another company might have a single product and grow based on seat usage. For each company, the “right” moments to conduct customer interviews will look different.

Many companies we work with, however, focus on a few specific moments:

• ​The outcome of a renewal period (a renewal win or a churn)
• ​Months 2–3 (after implementation has been completed and you want to see if they’re capturing value)
• ​Month 6 (when you’re a ways out from renewal but most buyers will have a good directional sense of where they’re headed)
• ​At upsell or expansion opportunities (where you can start to see how unique journeys converge through your products)

Picking the right moment can change “It’s fine” feedback to “Wow do I have some meaty details to tell you!”—which is where the magic happens.

Make existing customer feedback a company problem, not a CS problem

I often talk to companies about how consuming win-loss feedback needs to be like a therapy session. Great therapists often talk about how, when facing a problem as a couple, you need to put yourself on the same side of the table and face the issue together. Too often we metaphorically put the problem (both in business and in relationships) in between us, and we all look at each other and start to point fingers. This leads to contention, defensiveness, and blame—which is never a good recipe for actually fixing the problem.

With win-loss analysis, you have the opportunity to put your entire company across the table from the customer feedback.

You might hear something like “We just felt like we could go with a cheaper solution and get the same results,” and instead of blaming one singular CSM for not “selling value,” you can start to figure out what marketing, sales, finance, strategy, engineering, and every other department can do to help. Now, the answer might actually be getting better CSMs, but it also might be changing your product roadmap, offering different packages, creating better customer marketing, receiving more engagement from sales leaders, or a litany of other options.

When you allow each group to see it on their own, you avoid jumping to the “easy” answer and instead allow each function to see how they can contribute.

Churn hurts. Your boards don’t want it, you don’t want it, and your customers don’t want it either—they certainly don’t sign up hoping to leave down the road! And although no company has ever kept 100% of its customers over time, win-loss analysis can help you to improve your customer retention.

When you give customers a microphone at pivotal inflection points and then allow unique individuals within your own organization to engage with that feedback, you’ll be shocked at the kinds of innovative and powerful solutions you’ll come up with.