"I need to say something that might make CS leaders uncomfortable: most of what your team does before a renewal is valuable, but it's listening to only one channel. Your EBRs, your health scores, your stakeholder maps. They capture what your customer is willing to tell you directly. What they don't capture is the conversation happening everywhere else. And that's usually where churn starts."
"I know because I ran the standard playbook for years. EBRs, stakeholder mapping, health score reviews, and renewal prep meetings, where we rated our gut feeling on a scale of green to red. We had dashboards. We had strong CSMs who genuinely cared about their accounts. And we still got blindsided. The $2M quarter is the one I can't forget. Two enterprise accounts churned in the same 90-day window. Both were green in every system we had. One had an NPS of 72."
Most pre-renewal customer success activities rely on direct, voluntary signals such as EBRs, health scores, and stakeholder maps. Those mechanisms capture only what customers choose to say to vendors and miss conversations in channels like Slack, procurement reviews, and private one-on-ones. Blind spots in coverage can let churn originate unseen, even when dashboards, NPS, and internal ratings indicate healthy accounts. Enterprise accounts can churn despite green system statuses, revealing a coverage gap rather than an execution failure. Detecting off-channel signals earlier requires expanding monitoring beyond formal touchpoints to include indirect conversations and procurement activity.
Read at TNW | Insights
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