The monsters are back! Churn monsters that is. Today we are going to take a look at our third customer churn risk – a slacker customer.

A slacker is a customer who could receive value from your offerings but is unwilling to put in the effort to either get started or continue using your product or service.

Sound like anyone you currently have as a customer?

Let’s take a look at a scenario involving a slacker customer and how you might successfully overcome this churn monster.

Scenario:

You receive a new customer account and have a kickoff call. On the line for this meeting is yourself (the CSM), the sales rep that sold the deal, and from the customer side, the Director that was the main point of contact for the purchase and Sean, who will be your primary user.

During the call you let the Director explain in her own words why the purchase was made and the intended goals for the solution. You then cover the details on what to expect during the implementation and onboarding process and outline the standard timeline.

It is identified that the Director will be your go to with assisting during the configuration phase and Sean will be your main contact from that point forward. He will be attending the training as he will be the main user.

Sean attended the on-boarding training course. He initially missed two of the classes that he has since made up.

Based off your interactions so far you are getting the sense that Sean isn’t 100% committed to the idea of using your solution and you are getting worried he will shirk off using the product all together.

What do you do?

Plan of Action:

You’ve gotten to the bottom of Sean’s slacker behavior. You’ve uncovered that the purchase was a top-down decision. Sean didn’t feel he had the need for your solution, which explains why he’s reluctant to change his process and put in the effort to learn something new.

To help tackle this, you first talk with Sean to fully understand what his process was and talk about what his barriers are to adopting a new process built around your product. Sean doesn’t really have any concrete objections other than the time and effort it will take.

From your discussion you identify three areas where your product can immediately make Sean’s job easier. You encourage him enough to give the new process a go. You outline with Sean the tasks that will need to be completed to launch these three new processes. Your plan is to break the tasks into smaller parts to help make them seem more approachable.

You then enter Sean into your automated adoption journey that maps out the milestones and will track his tasks and achievements. You’ve also set the timelines for each milestone and the journey overall, which will help to make the expectations clear for you and Sean.

You also set up real-time alerts to track Sean’s product usage. When you see he’s taken a break from using your product you reach out to see what you can do to help. You also equally reach out to praise him for when he has made progress with adopting the new process.

You are now six months down the road, and Sean has changed his behavior and his processes. He has become accustomed to using your product, and you in turn have helped him look like a hero by increasing his productivity.

Way to go on defeating that churn monster!

Score

You: 3

Churn Monsters: 0

If you missed the first two installments of our churn monster blog series, you can find them here:

Churn Monster Playbook: Your Definitive Guide to Fighting Customer Churn

In this playbook, we will catalog the twelve common monsters that attack customer retention. For each churn monster, we will give a description of what its churn risk looks like, so you can easily identify it within your customer accounts. We will also give you actionable tips to help you combat each churn monster, and insight into how ChurnZero can help.

Download this playbook now to learn how to fight customer churn.

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