Digital CS Lessons Learned
blury webinar screen on a laptop
Digital CS is hot now, but it’s not new. In 2013, LinkedIn realized it had a churn problem. The Talent Solutions (Recruiter tools) business was a few years old and had already grown to nearly $100M. However, the white-glove treatment used with early customers didn’t scale to everyone as we took on more and more accounts. Smaller customers were getting left behind. This is when I joined the tiny Customer Education team, tasked with enabling customers to thrive with our products at scale.
Over the next couple of years, we partnered with the best and the brightest minds LinkedIn could hire to determine what touchpoints led to retention and growth. Conversely, we looked at the behavior that told us the client was likely to churn, so we had time to course-correct. As a high volume two-sided marketplace we had the unique ability to see all the interactions of our customers (employers), and their customers (job seekers). This allowed us to rapidly test touchpoints, and multiple communication strategies, while measuring short and long-term impacts.
A few of our key learnings:
Time-to-first-value is low-hanging fruit.
When we looked at the behaviors of customers who churned, those who took longer than 30 days to get end-users to complete onboarding would churn at 3x higher rate than those who had end-users up and running quickly.
In a higher touch account, CSMs worked to personalize a change management plan with the Exec Sponsor. Smaller accounts were just getting an automated email with directions to set themselves up. We tackled the smaller accounts first.
We adapted our welcome messaging from a ‘how-to’, to a ‘why-it-matters’ message, and enabled interstitial pop-ups to guide the ‘how-to’ once they were in the platform.
If they didn’t log in and do the basics by day 8, we invited them to a webinar with other new users. A CSM could help them in a 1:many group of noobs. These were so effective we started with 1x per week in the US and grew to 2-3x daily around the world in 20+ languages over the next two years.
On Day 20, we automatically sent the buyer a list of who had not yet engaged, along with some templated tools to share on their internal communication channels we didn’t have access to, like their DM or team meetings, to encourage end-users to onboard.
We pulled in a couple of people from our support team to join our initiative. They were lower-cost resources than a CSM and wanted to build new career skills. They allocated 5-10 hours a week to do 15-minute, 1:1 outbound calls to any remaining new seat-holders who hadn’t engaged by day 25. The average contract value per seat was $5k+ so this was a great investment.
Within 24 months, slow time-to-first-value was no longer on the top 20 factors for churn because it was so rare.
Takeaways:
Clearly define your goal internally and test intervention points
Communicate the value proposition to the recipient
Vary the communication channels starting with the lowest effort
Live interaction is efficient in a 1:many cohort of similar-maturity customers
Feature utilization that leads to the intended value is critical but harder to figure out.
A recruiter's goal was to find ideal candidates that wouldn’t have otherwise applied, bring them into the candidate pool, and therefore cut the time to hire with better quality new hires. To do that, they needed to be able to do a good search and send a compelling message (InMail). However, data mining and outbound marketing were not skills that were common among recruiters in the early 2010s.
Initially, we had training content, that would make them great at their jobs, available on demand on a separate site. But the utilization of the training material was terrible.
Many were using our products and not getting anywhere, because they didn’t know what they didn’t know. This would inevitably lead to frustration and disengagement with our product, and eventually churn.
To get the appropriate message to them at the point of time they needed it, we needed to integrate the experience without taking them out of our product. Also, we needed to track if they took the intervention we prescribed to see what was working. We had to piece together an embedded Learning Management System (LMS) with single sign-on, and bi-directional data feeds from our Data Warehouse. The tooling that is available today is much more plug-and-play!
To help end-users realize they had a problem, we used just-in-time messages in the product and as well as email. The messages that worked best included benchmarking for context. For example:
“Your InMail open rate is 3% vs an average of 29% for recruiters like you. This 5-minute tutorial video will improve your subject lines so candidates hear your message”
Initially, some features we highlighted ended up having little impact on business outcomes or satisfaction. For example, there were tasks we assumed clients would perform in our system that were actually being performed in another software. No amount of training on how/why to use that feature in our software was going to catch on because it wasn’t relevant. It took us a few ‘ride-alongs’ with recruiters to understand common day-to-day workflows to figure out which features to focus on to really move the needle.
Our 30-minute 1:many onboarding webinars were such a hit, we tried that strategy for all the topics in the early days with mixed results. For less complicated topics, videos, interactive tutorials, and tip sheets that took less than 5 minutes to consume proved to have much higher engagement and were effective in changing behaviors.
Takeaways:
Focus on behaviors that most heavily impact the intended business value of your solution
Clients need to know what they don’t know in order to improve
Proactively offer solutions in real-time without users having to leave their workflow to participate
Make content bite-sized
Results
In those three years, we grew our business 20x while only increasing headcount 5x. We brought churn down to single digits annually. Honestly, we only scratched the surface of what digital strategies could do to help customers thrive at scale. The industry has come a long way in the decade since we embarked on this journey and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
Annie Dean is CEO and Cofounder of RecastSucces; working to diversify the tech industry by helping career transitioners, supporting mentorship, and offering fractional CS leadership programs for SaaS companies. Since 2013 she has been in CS leadership and executive roles at LinkedIn, Coursera, and several rapid-growth startups. She has a Master's Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC Paris. She also leads the popular Udemy Business course Smart Tips: Customer Success.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniedean/
