At BrightGauge, because we are a SaaS product and have no contracts we have to drive value for our customers every day or they can just cancel. We purposely structured our plans and pricing this way because this is how we would want software to be sold to us. There are lots of reasons besides “not enough value” that people will leave our platform, like the customer getting acquired or migrating to a data source that doesn’t integrate etc.
When our team reviewed the reasons for several of our recent cancellations, we found a large portion were because they never got "implemented". Our definition of being implemented is that you have set up BrightGauge, the data is flowing, hopefully you have set up a few dashboards, a few reports and built some custom gauges. Once that has been completed and you get the metrics you want, we consider you officially “Implemented”.
For legacy software vendors where you pay for the software upfront and just have a small maintenance after the fact, they don’t necessarily care if you implemented the software. Large enterprise companies have built billion dollar business selling software that never gets implemented. We call that “shelf-ware” instead of “software”.
So at BrightGauge this year we implemented a more formal customer implementation review process. Each month we block off 90 minutes and 4 of us sit in a conference room (check out the picture below) and review each of the prior month’s sign ups. We divide up the different applications we use to support our customers (Salesforce, ZenDesk, HubSpot, and our internal Admin tool) and each person logs into one application to provide an update.
I know it sounds a bit manual but given the size of our customer base and the intimate knowledge we have of our customers it works for us. Our plan is once we get a good understanding of the data points we can automate it with Intercom.
After our first meeting we all agreed it was a lot of fun and a great exercise to sync up on how our customers are doing.
