Many companies misunderstand churn analysis, often attributing the loss of an account to superficial reasons like losing an executive sponsor, budget cuts, or company acquisitions. However, these are only part of the story, the final domino in a long series of events. If a product or service truly adds value and is indispensable, such changes shouldn't lead to churn.
The real challenge lies in identifying the root causes of churn, which are often hidden beneath the surface. Traditional explanations like "loss of executive sponsor" or "budget cuts" fail to address the underlying issues that make customers vulnerable to leaving. This is where having a strong customer experience (CX) framework is essential, with good and consistent quarterly business review (QBR) processes, regular customer scores, and feedback structures with high response rates across all accounts.
Our research shows that 85% of B2B suppliers believe improvements to their QBR process would lead to higher rates of customer retention. Their buyers agree, as 82% say they have cancelled a contract due to poor-quality QBRs.
Uncover customer insights with QBRs
The majority of suppliers and buyers also agree that the QBR is the number one opportunity to evidence consistent value and innovation across a contract. By implementing easily accessible communication channels between all key stakeholders on both your side and the customers’, throughout the entire contract lifecycle, you can uncover the true reasons behind churn. For example, what might seem like a simple case of "loss of executive sponsor" often reveals deeper issues. These could be:
- A challenging onboarding process that was never fully resolved
- Misaligned expectations about how the product or service should work
- Recurring technical or operational issues that created friction
- Resource changes that impacted delivery
- Value demonstrations that didn't resonate with the broader team
Your business reviews process is already a consistent framework that should highlight these potential issues before churn becomes a risk.
How to fully utilise customer feedback
First of all, you need to ensure you consistently reach all key stakeholders so you are strategically aligned across key objectives, added value, and innovation. Our research showed that one of the biggest frustrations among both buyers and suppliers was the fact that key stakeholders don’t attend strategic business review meetings. To change this, you need to both revamp your business reviews processes and ensure the materials and meetings are essential and add value. You should also share your business review materials, actions, insights and conclusions with all key stakeholders whether they attended or not.
By combining your strategic business reviews with gathering NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Survey) and customer feedback you’ll not only reach more key people, but you’ll also gain higher response rates than standalone surveys and feedback requests ever will. Additionally, giving your customers a direct communication channel to your senior leadership team to raise any concerns or challenges further ensures you keep your finger on the pulse of your customer relationships.
You can read more about the strengths of NPS in our whitepaper
Why is visibility into customer sentiment so important?
The more you know about your customers’ thoughts throughout the customer lifecycle the more you can stop focusing on things you can't control, like mergers and acquisitions or executive turnover. Instead, you can zero-in on the actionable factors that truly determine customer success, such as:
- Onboarding efficiency and effectiveness
- Expectation alignment from day one
- Technical or operational issue resolution and prevention
- Resource consistency
- Knowledge transfer
- Early value realisation
But perhaps most importantly, customer feedback visibility helps you spot potential root causes of churn while there's still time to act. Regular feedback processes, alerts and real-time visibility of scores and comments, will help you identify which customers might be vulnerable to churn - even if they seem fine according to your Account Manager.
For example, if a customer says they're leaving due to budget cuts, feedback visibility and sentiment mapping throughout the customer lifecycle helps you understand if it's really about budget, or if there’s something else. Perhaps it’s more about value that wasn't properly demonstrated, ROI that wasn't clearly tracked, strategic priorities that weren't aligned, or opportunities you missed months ago – sentiment insights will help you find out.
Final thoughts
The result? You're not just documenting why customers leave; you're getting better at understanding the real reasons behind their decisions. This is where Clientshare comes in as we can help you do something about it. In customer experience, as in medicine, treating symptoms might make you feel better temporarily, but understanding and addressing root causes is the only way to ensure long-term health. By using Clientshare’s transformational platform, Pulse, to create a consistent business reviews process combined with regular customer feedback frameworks, you’ll have the tools to do exactly that.
“We use Pulse to give our customers the chance to voice their thoughts in a consistent way, providing an extra resource alongside the traditional methods of providing feedback. That way, whether they were able to attend a review meeting or not, they can have their say.
Getting feedback and knowing what customers are thinking in real time via Pulse allows me to inform the wider business about the health of client relationships more accurately.”
