Increasing customer product usage by 7% to re-establish high growth

What We Did 

A $1 billion, high-growth SaaS provider with 100,000 accounts globally found its product adoption, usage, and retention rates dropping. Based on our track record and capabilities partnering with software companies, the company asked West Monroe to transform its customer success model to drive product adoption and improve retention.  

Our multidisciplinary team of software industry experts and customer experience practitioners set to work unlocking the potential in the organization’s core products—with an eye toward restarting its high growth. Over the course of multiple projects spanning 12 months, our team assessed performance and benchmarked capabilities, developed a practical improvement plan, and deployed new customer success practices—with immediate and positive impact. 

The Opportunity

The company had an established customer success model in place, but it wasn’t seeing the results it expected. Retention levels were low and flat, as were product adoption and utilization rates of newer products. The company needed to take action to reverse these trends and re-establish its high-growth trajectory.

An Undeniably Different Approach

Our team has a long track record of helping software companies drive install base growth by focusing on customer success best practices and metrics. We’ve helped more than 100 leading technology companies grow, launch new offerings, and transform their business and operating models. That made us uniquely prepared to help.

We brought an approach grounded in the concept of customer success—in short, making sure customers realize the value they expect from the services they receive. This involves:

• Measuring customer health as well as experience
• Developing approaches for optimizing retention and average annual revenue
• Transforming the operating model to deliver customer success at scale

The Output

We transformed the company’s customer success model, organization, and practices to improve net retention and drive adoption. To do that, our team:

• Assessed the current operating model and economics by developing a detailed view of churn and expansion across segments, customer success engagement models, and channels
• Benchmarked customer success operations, technology, charter, metrics, and organization to prioritize improvements
• Developed an 18-month transformation roadmap and associated financial analysis and investment case
• Re-defined the customer success charter to focus on proactively driving product adoption and away from reactive customer service
• Updated the customer segmentation model to incorporate adoption potential
• Defined key financial and operational metrics – placing more emphasis on net retention – and helped create a reporting dashboard
• Updated practices and systems for driving customer success, including producing adoption and renewal playbooks 

Returns You Can Measure

Our work transformed the organizational structure within customer success and established more effective operational practices. This increased the productivity of the company’s customer success managers. More importantly, it delivered measurable progress toward key goals: Within a year of launching the new model, the company increased net retention by 1% to 2%—resulting in incremental top-line growth of $20 million—and product usage by 5% to 7%.