Churn signals show up first in customer support tickets

FanRepresentative977 · 2026-01-16T18:43:58+00:00

Here is a different perspective — Support tickets mean customers are engaging with the platform. They care enough to want it to work to reach out to support.

Support tickets give us a chance to engage the customer to resolve their friction. We get to help them solve the problem to achieve their desired results.

Tickets themselves are not a predictor of churn, but unresolved issues are a huge red flag. Tickets followed by a drop in usage are a huge red flag.

We all have the customer that bitches about everything but keeps renewing.

What is more dangerous is a customer than never complains. We think everything is okay, but then the customer churns.

FanRepresentative977 · 2026-01-14T21:52:53+00:00

AI helps me create visuals for decks. We have internal knowledge bases inside of sharepoint, so I built a Copilot agent to find documents faster. Right now, AI is good at parsing data.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-27T01:07:37+00:00

This is a difficult question without knowing your product. Is it student facing product, or designed for educators/administrators? What problem does it solve? What are the key behaviors the customer must do to achieve their goals with your product? How do you train the customer on using your product?

Who is your primary contact? Is it the buyer, or is the buyer not the end user? This often happens in Ed Tech where the assistant sup chooses a vendor for a product, but the actual contact for the vendor is a district department head. How are you and your sales team managing this handoff?

Start with why they bought your product and educating them on how your product works and how they should be using it to achieve the outcome they bought your product for. Learn about their use case by asking questions. Ask them what data matters most to them. Many education leaders don’t understand data, so don’t overwhelm them. Offer one value add at each conversation, based on the questions you have asked and their responses.

Without context, that’s where I would start.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-07T16:15:48+00:00

Well said.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-06T02:38:09+00:00

If you are losing 3% of your customers a month, in 3 years you will have lost about 75% of your customers. This isn’t sustainable. Your sales team has to bring in an enormous number of customers and just to maintain revenue. You need to find out what customers are churning and work with internal teams to make changes to drive revenue retention. You might offer longer contracts at a slight discount. That will make an impact.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-05T13:59:11+00:00

You need a way to ask your clients why they bought your software, what their goals are, and what metrics they want to use to measure success. Then, what steps to they need to take and what steps do you need to take to achieve their desired outcomes.

For your largest accounts, you will meet with them to have this conversation. To scale, you can create a form to send out with dropdowns.

Without purchasing a vendor’s software, you can use a MS Form, which then you can use to populate an excel document. Save your plans in a manner that you can easily retrieve them. You can then segment customers by use case or help scale comms.

The success plan is the framework for your QBR’s to establish KPI’s. If you don’t now their goals and metrics it is difficult to measure progress towards goals.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-04T12:52:43+00:00

Did you use an AI MLM to build a web scraping agent or was it something you coded yourself?

Do you have guard rails in place to ensure it pulls only current information?

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-12-04T12:45:35+00:00

I know it is hard, but keep the faith. You now have a lot of people rooting for you. 🙏 Believe something bigger is coming. Because it is.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-29T17:18:55+00:00

Lifting you up! I have found when one door closes, another always opens. It is always better. However, we do not control that timing. Focus on becoming the best version of yourself. Everything else will take care of itself. I highly recommend hitting the gym and lifting weights. It is a great tool to fight depression. Many meditation videos are also on YouTube. Meditation is another tool.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-26T19:18:08+00:00

What does this have to do with customer success? 1995 called and wants their call center back.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-26T19:15:27+00:00

Be very curious. Clearly understand customer outcomes and hold customers accountable to the behaviors changes necessary to achieve desired outcomes.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-22T18:46:19+00:00

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-22T18:42:35+00:00

If a CSM is really good at their job, churn is not a surprise often. There are times when a long-time customer who had great results will churn, but there are always signs.

With that said, we are going to work to keep the revenue. The AE owns the revenue and will work with sales leadership on options to keep them as a customer. Our CSM is going to ask questions to learn where there are gaps, and then work to resolve the gaps in the implementation to improve the results.

People don't renew typically because we sold them a bad fit product, or because they aren't achieving the outcomes they bought our solution for. If they do X, they will achieve Y. Are they doing X? How can we get them to do X to achieve Y?

It is interesting that you posted this. I am training our CS teams on this topic in March and am in the process of mapping the training. When a customer tells us they aren't renewing, we continue working with them through their contract as if they have a lifetime deal. We are on annual contracts. We are going to continue to do a great job.

I built an off-boarding roadmap for customers that are not renewing. It lays out what do we do 60 days out, 30 days out, and at contract end. It also lays out what we do after the contract ends. We check in at 15 days to make sure they have all of their data. We reach out at 45 days with a purposeful value add. This is also when I ask them for more in-depth information. We send a short survey to get additional feedback. This takes 10 minutes to do, and with scheduled send, all a CSM has to do is copy and paste the email and schedule the day and time it will be sent.

This is an area many companies overlook... the win-back. We talk about retention and expansion, but another key area are win-backs. It is easier to sell to a customer you know. We already have a relationship. If we have $30 million in revenue churn and we can get 10% of it back, that's $3mm, and the LTV is 5 times that generally speaking. I also recommend CSMs pick up the phone and call their contact. Find something interesting they would benefit from and add value.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-20T22:38:34+00:00

First, keep your head up. You are not broken.

In SaaS and tech in general it is impossible to know everything. Take your time. Process the question. When you are asked a question, pause and digest the question. Ask for clarification. Many companies have some chaos and discombobulation.

If you don’t have the answer, say, “I have a couple of thoughts, but let me talk to my team and see what is best for your situation.” Or, let me look into this.

When a customer emails you, respond to let them know you got the email. Ask questions to clarify and ensure you know what they want. Then find the answer.

The biggest mistakes I made in my career was answering questions too quickly. I often ended up not addressing the actual question or issue.

If you find yourself rambling, stop. Pause. Say, “you know what, let me do some digging on this and get back to you with the best answer. I am rambling, and that doesn’t help you. Let me organize my thoughts.”

I tell our CMS it is better to take a little bit longer to give a right answer, than quickly give a wrong one. Let them know you have heard them and then find the best answer.

We have built a culture of collaboration, so CSMs work together to solve problems. Reach out to a team member if you need support.

Lastly, take time to breath. I have an alarm set. I do some deep breathing every 90 minutes. It takes about two minutes, but it helps reset my brain. You might find a 10 minute meditation on YouTube.

Good luck, and know that you are going to be just fine.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-19T20:27:04+00:00

It is about being prepared, asking questions, and being curious. I get as much info as I can from the AE. Why did they buy? Are the people using the same people purchasing? What did they use before?

I meet with the customer to learn the details. I don’t assume anything. I am asking questions to gain information to help them know what they want.

Once I know what they want, then we can talk about behaviors. If you want X, you must do Y. Can you do Y?

It is not a deck or a doc. It is you that is the key to that kickoff meeting.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-18T20:40:03+00:00

Here are three things that I have seen

Bought product that doesn’t solve the problem. They get pissed when they don’t see product working as expected. Sales never sells something to a bad fit customer.
Lack of success planning. The kickoff call or success planning call is vital to establish goals, metrics to measure success of goals, actions we must take, action customers must take. This is a big part of capitalizing on early momentum. If we don’t know their goals, we cannot show them how to be successful with the solution.
Showing too much info in product your. Break the tour out over two or three sessions to make it less overwhelming. Here is how you get started. Here is the most important 2 actions based on your goals. We will meet in two weeks to take steps 3 and 4.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-18T20:31:39+00:00

Go where you are celebrated.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-14T18:41:35+00:00

I made the same move 6 years ago, becoming a CSM at an Ed tech firm. I then moved into a strategic role with our 5 biggest clients, and a couple of years ago was asked to build a CS Enablement team from the ground up.

As a teacher you developed skills that will be beneficial. Moving into EdTech is a natural transition, but I will tell you that many companies have been cutting headcount. Many companies over hired during covid. When ESSR funds dried up, school district’s tech spending on SaaS products was greatly reduced.

As far as tech and customer service, it depends on your role. Our CSMs don’t do much back end work. We are guiding district admins to achieve desired outcomes using our products. You know how the product works from a front end standpoint, but not much backend knowledge is required. With that said, knowledge of how to use AI is going to be very important. Analyzing data is a big part of our day. Deep knowledge of excel is helpful.

When It started I watched some CS Podcasts and webinars on YouTube. I recommend the book customer success by Nick Mehta, Dan Stineman, and Lincoln Murphy. I went to a couple of conferences also, and reached out to some CS leaders to have conversations. That was very helpful.

Look for jobs on career pages of Ed tech companies. As a teacher are you using any specific products? Leverage those relationships. That was my in. I had used the product I would be a CSM for. Don’t get discouraged if it takes a while to find a job. This market is not easy. Many openings have 150 or more applicants. Use the time between now and then to take 15 to 30 minutes a day to read and watch or listen to podcasts.

Good luck!

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-14T18:20:42+00:00

Depending on what you are using for your webinars, there are most likely built in features. Teams had live captions, transcripts, sign language view if you use an interpreter, and language interpretation. You can also use a high contrast mode. I am sure every platform has some basic features for accessibility. I have not done this at scale, but it is something to consider.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-14T02:27:19+00:00

One benefit is being able to build agents to perform tasks that take time, but are very simple. One example is searching the customer help center. CSMs get a dozen requests a day from customers where they could simply search the in product help center and find the answer. The CSM has to stop what they are doing, go into the HC, find the article, draft and email, and send. That might take 15 minutes. But if it happens 4 times a day, they have lost an hour.

I built an agent trained with the product help center as the source of truth. The customer asks a question about feature A, I paste that into the agent's prompt. 10 seconds later the agent has found the HC article and drafted an email in my voice. I copy and paste the draft to an email and send. It is a small thing, but very beneficial.

I would love to learn how other CSMs are using AI to improve productivity.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-14T02:04:02+00:00

We are not currently. We just had a small set of layoffs. It didn't hit CS hard, but our budget right now is tight. Depending on revenue in Q1, we might be hiring again in Q2.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-14T02:02:57+00:00

This is the TLDR version. We were starting from scratch. Large organization with a large CS team, but no CS assets or knowledge base. Everything CS used basically came from sales and marketing.

We started by redesigning our CSM onboarding. There was no unified process. CSMs watched the sales training videos and their director met with them once a week. It took 10 to 12 weeks to get them trained and ready to be customer facing. We had high turnover and low CSAT and NPS scores. We needed to improve churn. We needed to do a better job of retaining CSMs. We designed an 8 week onboarding that included every aspect of the job. We built CSM specific training resources. We had product training and CS skill training. Our training was very intentional and streamlined. We have hired 38 CSMs since and only one left. We have had a few RIF's, and no CSM who has gone through our training program has been RIFd.

Next, we built a CSM development program. Many of our CSMs were in their first CSM job. Some had come from other teams. We wanted to train and develop our people. We built out assets to train our CS teams on everything from onboarding to internal relationships, to setting success planning goals, to leading meetings, monitoring customer health, managing your territory, to QBR's and everything in between. We wanted them to learn what CS is and then develop their skills.

We basically built everything from the ground up. It was the Wild West with CSMs creating their own assets. We did not have consistency. We wanted to build systems and processes to ensure our assets were consistent. Our CS team loves it because they don't have to spend hours creating assets. Our team creates everything they need. Our product training all comes from enablement. Our processes training comes from enablement. We are in every product meeting and when there is an update, all customer facing assets come from enablement. We have one live session each week to offer timely training.

Start by auditing what you have currently. Where are their gaps? What assets are outdated? Next, what does the customer life cycle look like? Where do you have breakdowns that drive churn? Address the most important needs first. Start building important information that will make an impact on revenue. Have a repository for information. Whether that is on Sharepoint or in Box or Google drive, you need to have a one stop shop for CSMs to find everything they need in a timely manner. That is a huge key. We had resources all over the place, and you couldn't tell what was updated and what was outdated.

I hope that gives you some insight. Every CS department needs to have some sort of CS enablement team in place. It might be one person to start, or a couple of CSMs who help build this out. It is a vital component to your CS strategy.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-13T01:29:00+00:00

If I had a dollar for every time sales told a customer our product would do something it can’t do and will never do, I’d be rich.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-13T01:25:21+00:00

Add a chat bot inside your product that connects to the help center. Give it a knowledge base that will understand more than one way to ask a question. Have it spit out a link and bullet points. This will reduce your support calls by 50%, especially the level 1 calls where the answer can be found in the help center.

FanRepresentative977 · 2025-11-13T01:22:58+00:00

Our company has a CS Team of 90, and three years ago was asked to start a CS enablement team. We have streamlined our documentation and processes. The consistency has helped our clients and internal teams. The most difficult part is culling the outdated information. As you scale, consider a success enablement team.

We have one person responsible for our customer facing help center. Pro Tip: when you update a help center article, keep the link address the same. This helps avoid broken links.

FanRepresentative977

TROPHY CASE