Churn is a company problem
It's not just a signal of failing customer success; you need your whole team to find and solve
Customer success teams in SaaS are most closely associated with measuring and preventing churn in business, often even having compensation or performance metrics tied to churn rates.
We look to CS teams to identify early warning signs of churn, but the project of reducing it isn’t a single team problem. It's a whole-company problem.
This piece from Kyle Poyar makes the case with examples of how other teams should be participating in retention. After all, churn is a signal of something missing about your business, not necessarily a lack of support from a CS team. It could be lack of a CS team getting in front of recurring issues, but also many other causes,: the product didn’t solve a problem, the pricing model didn’t work for them, new alternatives entered the market.
It’s a good thing to remember that churn is not some isolated phenomenon. It's lagging evidence of a missing link in your value chain. If a customer leaves because you’re missing an integration, that’s a product problem, but one you should be able to discover long before they cancel their plan. If they resist adding new seats and are looking for excuses to remove users, perhaps the pricing and packaging model is a wrong fit for the problem being solved; value might not be aligned with the scaling in spend. Maybe you pushed too hard on closing the deal and sold to a non-ideal buyer inside an otherwise ideal company. So many things can be contributing factors, obscured without deeper investigation to find root causes.
All of the examples are levers that impact churn, some very directly, some as second- or third-order mechanisms. And churn is often multicausal. There isn't necessarily a single Big Pain you can resolve to rebound. A rich understanding of the drivers of your product-market fit and the usage behaviors that show positive signs allows you to instrument an early warning system to tip you off on impending churn (and also growth!).
Tracking your churn rates is step one to diagnosing where it’s coming from. Approaching churning (or even just stalling) customers with a jobs-to-be-done and pain identification objective should help uncover the deeper causes of churn you can do something about in teams other than customer success.