A large multinational financial software company with over 1,000 employees worldwide, focused on banking customers in a highly competitive solution sector, had several disgruntled customers across various regions. As many financial service providers and banking organisations were moving towards digital platforms & digital applications, the need to have a stable and functioning SaaS solution was critical. The Customer Success team was a mixture of people transferred from other groups, and there was a cohort of several high-profile accounts definitely at-risk. This was a classic Code Red scenario.
The Challenge
There were two immediate needs; to engage the team, and to save a cohort of customers that were fast on the way to churn. I was newly installed as the Head of Customer Success. I had inherited a team of CSMs who were excess resources from different business units; Support, Project Management, and Operations who had been assembled and called “Customer Success.” The sales pipeline was stalled, and there had been 6 Country General Managers in 6 years. As time went on, there would be an additional 2 GMs before my time had ended and 6 months without any in-country General Manager.
I began working with the team to give them purpose, structure and coaching in Customer Success. This took 12 months as I was also being called to reduce headcount each quarter. I needed to fight tooth & nail to keep the team intact.
The second need was saving a cohort of 5 high-profile accounts at different stages of churn readiness. Firstly, I immediately looked at what was occurring from a technical support view and found one of the customers had 160 open tickets, 80 of which were of “high” importance, 12 being “critical” and the remaining 68 across medium to low. However, we had 30 open Root Cause Analysis (RCA) reports yet to be provided and a growing perception of our technical support team as “a black hole.” My discussions with our Head of Support showed me that they were a team under tremendous pressure and heavily under-resourced. To manage 180 local customers they had a shared pool of 5 staff. It was a ticking time bomb.
The Process
A ‘Renewal Playbook’ was developed with objection handling tips & tricks. Workshops and hypothetical scenarios were delivered for the team to practice. I reached out to my customer sponsor; the bank’s CIO. I asked if I could attend the site over two days and conduct a deep due diligence on our platform and history with his company. In parallel, I advised I would be bringing our Head of Technical Support and a Technical Project Manager who would work with the bank’s team to address the tickets in the queue.
The Outcome
With collaboration across Support, Operations, Product, Sales and Finance, churn was prevented. An agreed milestone plan was developed. Over 18 months the highly unstable customer cohort was taken off the churn path, and we expanded license volume and reset the relationships. 2.5 good years followed before the Customer Success practice was abandoned in favour of more sales resources.
The Company: A large multinational financial software company
The Challenge: Engage the Team and Save 5 High-Profile Accounts on the edge of Churning
The Outcome: Success!
The Executive: Donato Rufo, Head of Customer Success
Donato Rufo
Donato Rufo is an award-winning strategic customer success leader and account manager with a strong history of transforming struggling teams into high-performers, building customer success functions from the ground up, and driving customer loyalty and multimillion-dollar revenue growth. As an engaged organised leader & individual contributor, he has consistently met targets through a strong commitment to the customer. With 20 years of experience in SaaS as a solution sales consultant with the past 16 years focused on the discipline of customer success, Donato found his passion as a CSM and has worked with many different sales teams and organisations across the APAC and North American markets.
