As we begin this new year, we want to share some great news. 

Today we’re excited to announce that Wootric is joining InMoment, a market leader in customer and employee experience. InMoment serves many of the largest, most sophisticated global organizations from Starbucks to Ford to VMWare. 

This next step in our evolution means great things for our customers and other businesses seeking a modern approach to CX improvement.  

We will continue to deliver the world-class product experience you expect from us. In addition, our pace of innovation and our ability to support our customers around the globe will accelerate as we leverage the considerable resources and expertise of InMoment. 

Our customers will also be able to tap into InMoment’s expertise and enterprise solutions as their CX needs evolve beyond our turnkey approach.

Read the official press release here. 

Seven years ago, we founded Wootric with a mission to empower customer-centricity in every organization through modern, always-on CX improvement.  We launched with a high-response in-app microsurvey and quickly disrupted a dated approach to gathering and responding to Net Promoter Score feedback. 

Guided by input from our customers, we invested in omni-channel feedback collection, AI-driven customer journey analytics, and native integrations with the modern tech stack — all the while staying true to the flexible, lightweight, user-centric approach to CX improvement that businesses expect from Wootric.  

Wootric now delivers the fastest ROI in the Experience Management category on G2.  Over 1200 businesses worldwide, including DocuSign, Zoom, and Comcast, use Wootric software to improve customer lifetime value with insights and action from voice of the customer data.  

We thank our customers, partners, investors, advisors, and above all members of our exceptional team for their support, and for choosing to be on the CX journey with us.  

Together, with InMoment, we will make 2021 an amazing year for customer experience!

With gratitude,

Deepa Subramanian, CEO  &  Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer

The founders would also like to extend a special thank you to Steve Gurney at Viant Group for representing Wootric through this process.

Executives and end-users look for different things when choosing software products. An executive, for example, might be more interested in ROI and scalability, while the end-user often cares more about just getting their work done, quickly and easily. 

There was a time when executives were the gatekeepers who decided which B2B software products their companies purchased while the end-user experience took a back seat—but that era has ended. Today, you’ve got to win over your end-users to gain a foothold in an organization and give your product a fighting chance.

What does this look like? Picture Sophie, an Accounting Manager who uses the free version of Zoom to chat with her brother in Spain. She prefers Zoom over Skype, so she recommends it at work. The department tries it out, likes it, and begins using the paid version. Eventually, other departments try Zoom and it gains company-wide adoption.  Cut to Zoom’s IPO in 2019, and global adoption in the wake of the pandemic. 

What is Product-Led Growth?

A Product-Led Growth (PLG) model focuses on the end user’s needs when developing products, crafting education and support strategies, and shaping user experience.

“Growth in a PLG business comes from consistently fine-tuning the product experience to optimize the rate at which new users activate, convert, and expand in the product. Ideally, these improvements start to compound over time, allowing PLG businesses to accelerate growth as they scale (unlike traditional SaaS businesses). Customer feedback is critical to prioritizing the areas that will make the biggest difference to your customers.”
— Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

Where end users rule, customer experience is everything

Welcome to the end-user era, a time when users (rather than CIOs or other executives) introduce SaaS products to organizations and drive product adoption.  If you want to succeed as a SaaS company in the end-user era, you need to find ways to eliminate end-user pain points and create a seamless experience.

Word of mouth drives new customer acquisition. Then viral adoption within a company increases customer lifetime value. This is a powerful combination. In recent years, PLG is how many of the most successful SaaS companies have rocketed to IPO. Think Zoom, Slack, Hubspot, and Atlassian.

If you’re at a company that takes a traditional approach to CX—tinkering around the edges, nudging the product team to “improve customer experience”—get ready for a big change. Once your C-Suite or VP of Product embraces Product-Led Growth, the spotlight will be on customer feedback in all forms.  CX metrics will drive cross-functional alignment and priorities. 

The relationship between CX and Product-Led Growth

Despite the name, Product-Led Growth is not solely the domain of the Product team. Customer experience is an integral part of any PLG strategy. “If there is a challenge in implementing Product-Led Growth, it is actually achieving alignment across and within teams along with monitoring the multiple digital and physical touchpoints affecting customer experience,” says Despina Exadaktylou, Director of Programs, Product-Led Growth Hub, the world’s first PLG academy.

Product Teams are taking note and initiating collaboration.

“Customer Experience focuses on brand loyalty and customers’ likelihood to recommend. User Experience [within a Product team] focuses on the immediacy of user interaction with your product. But the lines between them have blurred as the role of the UX researcher and the tools in our toolkit have expanded beyond the narrow focus of the user’s engagement with the user interface, “ says Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm. She counsels product teams by saying, “If you are siloed within a UX group that isn’t engaging with CX stakeholders, seek opportunities to … collaborate with them. We all want the same thing—great user experiences and strong loyalty to brand.”

Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hubspot, takes this one step further. “To excel and thrive in a product-led company, you must be great at cross-functional collaboration,” says Kieran “A lot of the benefits that [PLG] has brought to companies is distilling your funnel down to these very concise metrics and the ones that actually matter.”

The importance of end user feedback

In the Product-Led Growth era, a seamless end user journey is paramount–from acquisition to advocate. As a result, product teams are hungry for data about user experience inside and outside of the product. Product managers and UX teams need to understand anything that is slowing end users down, so they can figure out how product design can alleviate that friction.

CX professionals and front line teams are skilled at using established customer experience KPIs to monitor loyalty and gather feedback. They have valuable information about end user pain at critical touchpoints in the SaaS user journey, including:

• • Onboarding experience
  • Support experience
  • Product or feature adoption

Creating Alignment

Product-Led Growth success demands shared accountability for metrics, so be ready to co-create a plan. Product teams benefit from the customer journey insight that CX teams (along with Success, Support, Sales and Marketing) bring to the collaboration. CX champions finally have the kind of cross-functional partnership that they’ve been seeking all along.

Is there a business that hasn’t lost a single customer? Doubtful. Customer churn is inevitable. For this reason, maintaining superior customer experience in a world of insurmountable choice and lagging brand loyalty is of utmost importance. Now I’m no mind reader, but since you’re still here, I’ll assume that you’re struggling with generating new demand for your business and keeping existing customers around at the same time.

For starters, let’s define customer churn.

Also known as customer attrition, churn refers to the rate at which your customers stop purchasing your product or service, signaling the end of their relationship with you. These customers stop bringing in revenue for your business. 

Let’s say that you started this quarter with 500 customers but lost 25; this means your churn rate is 5%. 

Other measurable ways for customer churn include:

1. Number of customers dropped
2. Percentage of customers lost
3. Amount of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) lost
4. Percentage of MRR lost

What Causes Customer Churn?

• Value – Pricing is tricky because customers are always looking for the most cost-effective solution to the problem they wish to solve. Customers need to feel like their purchase was worth the cost, so it’s crucial to establish value early on, through customer onboarding and education. Otherwise, they’re at risk for churn. 
• Product Fit – Another common reason for customer churn is an inferior fit. If you have a sales team that’s hustling to hit quota but isn’t incentivized to sell to good-fit customers, your company will face consequences. Soon after their purchase, customers will realize they can’t achieve their goals with your product and will churn.
• User Experience – If you have a product that’s not very intuitive or your software is glitchy, chances are customers will be less likely to use it on a regular basis and build expertise with it. They may not stick around for long. 
• Competitors – Even if you believe you’re assisting customers to achieve their desired outcomes, they’ll still churn if they firmly believe that a competitor can do a better job. Competition is fierce these days, so you need to work hard to set yourself apart from your competition.
• Missing Features/deliverables – Let’s say you fail to fulfill a goal that was initially agreed on while getting a client on board. When you fail to provide services as promised, you’re bound to lose a customer.

What Are Some Churn Indicators to Watch Out For?

1. Weak CX metrics – When thinking about churn, there are two CX metrics, in particular, that you should pay close attention to:

• • Net Promoter Score.  The grand-daddy of customer experience metrics, a detractor or passive NPS survey response is a leading indicator of churn. 
  • Customer Effort Score. Many software companies have adopted CES to measure the ease of getting started with your company or product. If this critical phase, often known as onboarding, is too difficult, churn can follow. 

2. Usage level – Customer churn is often preceded by a period of decreased usage level, so keep a close eye on users’ login activity. This will help you to identify at-risk customers right before they churn. Also, if a customer downgrades to a lower tier of your product, this should be worrisome news – there’s a good chance that this customer will soon stop using your product altogether.

3. Customer’s KPI’s – If your product or service isn’t helping customers achieve their KPIs, then the chance of them churning is much higher. If you notice that a valued customer isn’t reaching their desired goals, it’s crucial that you reach out to them and find out what you can do to better help them achieve those goals.

4. Customer Health – While measured definitively when a customer renews or doesn’t, customer success teams look at a number of factors to assign a customer health score to an account. Take a look at the kinds of customer support interactions you’re seeing from the customer. After using your service, do you think the customer is getting what they’re paying for? How does the account manager feel about the customer’s state of mind about the services they’re buying from you? Factor in the account’s CX metrics. As soon as you have an idea of who might leave, you’ll be able to take all the relevant steps to define the problem, fix it, and retain their business. Eventually, you can start to implement a systematic approach to measuring customer health, uncovering at-risk customers, and reaching out to them.

5. Feature Adoption – Every product or service has some key feature that makes it stand out from competitors. If a valued customer isn’t using these features, this is an indicator that they might churn soon.

6. Support – This point refers to the number of support issues raised, the severity of the issues, the time it took to resolve them, and the customer’s satisfaction with the interaction (often measured with a CSAT survey). These factors can have a significant impact on a customer’s health, so they’re important to pay attention to. If a customer hasn’t reported any issues or asked any questions, this could also be a red flag – a silent customer doesn’t mean they are happy with your product. 

What Needs to Be Done?

1. Engage with your customers.

This might sound obvious, but engaging with your customers is the best way to make them stay. Proactively inquire about how they are doing using CX surveys at key journey points. This will help you identify who is happy and who is at risk. Armed with this information, follow up with a conversation if warranted. Get them on the phone and show that your company genuinely cares. But don’t stop there – keep engaging. Depending on the size of the customer, you may want to schedule a quarterly check-in, and certainly one in advance of renewal. 

In addition to talking directly to customers, provide ample and educational content about the key functional benefits of your product. Offer regular news updates, to communicate your commitment to innovation in service of their success.
With this kind of communication, you can get customers to keep coming back by showing them the value of using your product and how they can make your product a part of their daily workflow. 

Last but not least, I’d like to recommend social listening – the process of finding and contributing to conversations about your company online by seeking out brand mentions, specific keywords or phrases, and comments. 

By doing these things, you’ll be able to keep tabs on what’s going on in terms of customer satisfaction.

2. Educate Your Customers

Another churn-prevention trick: provide plenty of quality educational or support materials. Try offering free trainings, webinars, video tutorials, and product demos. Do whatever it takes to make your customers feel comfortable and informed. Put simply, you must not only give customers tools that work but also offer training on how to best use these tools. In this way, you’ll also be able to demonstrate the full potential of your product or service.

3. Set realistic expectations

As I mentioned before, failing to deliver on services as promised can result in a very unhappy customer that is at high risk of churning. One of the common practices I have seen across several industries is to over promise and under deliver. Why would a salesperson want to do this? There could be numerous reasons: 

3. • They fear they might lose a potential customer
   • They’re facing pressure from their boss
   • They desire to come across as the “deal maker”  
   • They’re desperate to close the deal
   • They’re unwilling to tell the customer what they don’t want to hear

4. Keep a keen eye on competitors

It’s a bad sign when your customers perceive your competition to be better. As you work on reducing customer churn, pay close attention to how your customers might perceive your competitors’ products, and don’t forget to benchmark your overall performance and customer satisfaction against your competitors. 

Lastly, remember, the stakes are higher than ever. It’s time to make smart moves!

Author Bio:
Vikash Kumar works as a manager in the offshore software development company Tatvasoft.com. In his free time, Kumar enjoys writing and exploring new technical trends and topics. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.