Your Clients’ Employees Are Quitting. What’s Your Plan?
There is a new Customer Success trend: everyone is leaving.
Most companies track account health, product adoption, support resolution and sentiment trends around NPS/CSAT. All of these help understand probability whether the customer will renew, expand, or churn.
However, there's a silent metric often being ignored, people churn at the customer contact level.
Whether voluntary or involuntary, customer contact churn can be an x-factor to understand why an account is retained, expanded, or churned.
The New Reality: Everyone is Leaving
Cut costs. Automate processes. Scale fast. It's happening internally at your company. It's likely happening externally within your customer's organization as well.
?? Your customer champion -- is gone.
?? Your "power user" -- the customer contact who truly knows how to use your product -- has switched employers.
?? Your CRM tracks renewal probability and risk has skyrocketed -- AI-driven playbooks cannot keep up with these nuances.
The Destruction of Institutional Knowledge
Customer Experience isn't just about customer satisfaction -- it's about continuity. When customer contact level tenure declines, continuity breaking down. Teams have spent years worrying about internal retention, but few have recognized the long-term impact of external churn.
Dive into the Data: Three Metrics to Start Tracking Today
If your executive team isn’t tracking customer contact churn, they’re likely missing one of the biggest reasons accounts are underperforming or leaving. Understanding this data can help you understand past churn cases, while giving you actionable insights on how to adjust approach with accounts at risk.
领英推荐
?? Customer Contact Tenure at Their Company – How long has your key customer been in their role as an employee?
?? Customer Contact Tenure with Your Product – How long has the contact actually been using your product?
?? Customer Contact Tenure with Assigned CSM – How long has the contact been paired with their current CSM?
Orchestration: What CX Leaders Can Do to Fix This
? Rethink your customer journey to account for frequent contact changes at customer organizations. Train AI models to incorporate customer tenure data.
? Improve continuity between CX and CS teams to ensure relationship stability. Flag and prioritize accounts where tenure mismatches create risk.
? Proactively engage new customer contacts to maintain momentum in customer relationships.
? Partner with Product to advocate and ongoing focus around improving core adoption for new users, including news users at existing clients.
Related Content
Transformational HealthCare Leader| AI, IT & Operations | Driving Organizational Excellence and $1B+ Value | Expert in Team Empowerment & Operational Strategies
2 周Spot on, Keith! The impact of customer contact churn is an overlooked risk that can make or break account retention. Companies have spent years perfecting internal retention strategies, but external churn—especially the loss of power users and champions—creates a hidden instability in customer relationships. ? Proactive onboarding for new customer contacts should be as much of a priority as onboarding new clients. ? Institutional knowledge must be continuously reinforced through documentation, automation, and embedded customer education. The companies that master continuity, not just satisfaction, will be the ones that drive long-term success. Thanks for putting a spotlight on this!
Healthcare Executive | Leadership Strategist | COO & Executive Leader l CRAVE Leadership Creator | Driving Operational Excellence & Cultural Transformation | Risk Management I EOS Integrator
3 周Keith Hanks:?This article's insights highlight a critical aspect of customer experience that often goes unnoticed: the impact of customer contact churn.? We can better understand the continuity needed for lasting relationships by tracking customer contact tenure. Let’s embrace this opportunity to innovate our strategies and foster resilience in our customer success teams. Together, we can transform challenges into pathways for growth and connection.
Customer Success Leader | Driving Retention, Growth & Scalable Strategies | Passionate About Building High-Performing Teams
3 周Thank you for the insight Keith. I have not thought about measuring contact tenure, we have normally used notificatons when a key stakeholder leaves an company. At the rate people are changing jobs these days, this makes perfect sense to track and monitor.
Love the upstream thinking here, Keith Hanks. Looking at the behaviors that precede the indicators is tough to do, but fruitful when done right. Great reminder to strengthen relationships vertically and horizontally to guard against when (not if) your champion moves on.