Turn surprises into opportunities with Chargebee Sr. Dir of Customer Success Arundhati Balachandran

An analysis of the chargebee customer base to understand the impact of COVID crisis and here's what we had so if you look at the chart on the left, the good news was that SaaS was strong and majority of the Chargebee customer base is in the B2B or B2C SaaS space and had faced limited impact three months ago with most of the countries under lockdown in the second quarter, the obvious industries impacted with contracting revenue where in the event space travel and tourism, food and beverage and restaurant businesses to mention a few. Apart from these, we were also seeing businesses in the digital marketing space being heavily impacted as organizations wanted to reduce cash burn while keeping cash flow as top priority. During these unprecedented times, we're also seeing revenue slowing down for IoT services, which made sense because a lot of buildings closed down and and construction services halted. So having said that, with the whole world shifting from the offline to online mode, the upside of revenue growth was also seen with businesses in the entertainment, elearning and remote work industries such as video conferencing tools, employee monitoring and E signature tools. So at the beginning of Q2, 75% of our customers had limited impact and now at the beginning of Q3 if you look at the chart on the right, we have about half of that with limited impact. The good news is a larger percentage close to about 35% of that has moved to growing and accelerating revenue, which means that the revenue started growing for at least 10% at a minimum month on month. On the flip side, we also had some customers about 19% not impacted earlier, but now facing slowing down revenue predominantly in the health and wellness and marketing side services. So overall the second quarter was about survival and cash flow and now in Q3 our customers are all focusing on growth and retention strategies. So with this information on our customer trends and analyzing the impact based on Vertical as the head of customer success, my team and I along with the company leadership set up playbooks for various scenarios based on customer impact. I'm really happy to share with you all that this pandemic brought all cross custom teams in chargebee together with the sole intention of taking care of our existing customers. So be it. Teams like marketing who usually spend a lot of time on inbound leads and prospective customers or product or engineering that are building out new features in the roadmap. Every team focused on initiatives for existing customers, with marketing doing webinars on retention strategies or product prioritizing 60% of their roadmap for existing customer requests. So retention continues to be the priority for the customer success team at chargebee and the main objective for us is always to extend our utmost empathy to all of our customers and help them out during these circumstances. Our first step back in Q2 was to proactively reach out to all of our customers to offer our support and and see how we can help them as an organization with all of our learnings as well as showcase how the chargebee product can help them in these circumstances. Especially with subscription management being our USP with both retention and growth capabilities. So I'll start with our learnings and strategies for retention, especially since at chargebee we use the chargebee product for subscription management and I sincerely hope that you have some actionable takeaways for your customers. So moving on to retention strategies for fast growing customers, especially those customers that are seeing accelerating revenue like in the E Learning or the OTT space and remote work industries where their sales has exploded. So it's both great and scary for them. It's great because you know they're seeing amazing sales and there's a great growth path. But it's also scary to handle the sudden surge of demand in terms of people, resources and planning. So they also need to plan for long term measures to prevent churn from customers once the COVID situation is averted and people are back at work. So here is where we have shared our knowledge and measures for long term retention so they have these insights and strategies to tackle this. So I'll start with have all your leading indicators for churn in place. So be it. Monitoring your customers revenue growth, product usage and logins Number of support tickets because any anomaly in these are telltale signs of an at risk customer. So apart from leading indicators, your business metrics, also known as lagging indicators, are always telling you powerful stories about your revenue. So maybe your total active subscriptions have taken a hit or accelerated in the last three to four months while your gross churn has increased despite the growth. So interpreting each of these metrics the right way is absolutely critical and so is automation of all these indicators so you have it quick and ready for you to consume. 2. Onboarding more customers on long term contracts so you buy time to showcase the value of your product thereby increasing stickiness which is great for both retention even after the crisis is averted. In the case of our customers in the remote space business, they've transitioned customers into long term contracts and focused on targeted campaigns where these campaigns are driving the behavior of their customers to embrace change and move towards a permanent distributed network of employees with so many upsides to it like access to world class talent with more geographical barriers and reducing expenses on office space, et cetera. So overall for retention we understand that the market is unpredictable even now and monitoring trends and acting on that information is absolutely critical. And over communication with all of our customers is absolutely key to stay ahead of these times. So we spoke about retention strategies and learnings from a charge B perspective for all growing customers. And now I'd also like to talk about customer stories on how they took advantage of the pandemic led opportunities into growth strategies and this is our way of celebrating some of these wonderful champions of change. So apart from customers in the E learning, OTT and remote workspace, we're also seeing customers in the digital signage, digital documentation, subscription commerce, hyperlocal delivery spaces doing very well as well. So irrespective of which industry you're in, if you are seeing a great growth in your business, if there ever a time there was to see freemium's upside outweigh its risk in B2B, it is now. While companies like Slack, Dropbox and other freemium success stories have paved the way with freemium, the shift has been Fairly slow in B2B, usually because of risk versus upside. Now is when freemium's upside outweighs risk. So your customers are more price sensitive than ever before, but their productivity and software needs are are increasing as they try to adopt new technologies that will help them emerge stronger from this crisis. So bringing users in today and monetizing later has lower risk versus losing them overpriced. It also creates a great platform for you to collect feedback from customers to ensure your product is innovating at the speed at which the markets and buyers are changing. So this is truly the right time to get your customers to fall in love with your product by extending free trials of features that might not necessarily be available to them on their current pricing plan, which also helps prioritize product stickiness and customer loyalty. One of our very own customers of Chargebee in the analytics software space has grown 7x over the last six months by taking advantage of Chargebee's premium offering. The second is we see that some of our fast growing customers are looking to expand into other markets and geographies. And the biggest the first step towards that is that they localize upfront. And what I mean by that is I'll give you an example. For example, if you are planning to expand into other markets which have other currencies, so setting up payment processes that accept multiple currencies to ensure that you are keeping up with the demand for your product by having all the local logistics ironed out. One of our oldest and top e learning customers based in North America in California was able to win more more international customers by accepting payments through PayPal. 3 this is regarding empowering your customers with a self service approach right in order to handle the fast growth and explosive signups, one of our fastest growing customers based on Australia has automated their inbound sales process with chargebee Self Serve post pandemic. This customer sales team was not prepared in terms of resources and people and empowering customers with a self serve portal allowed their end customers to to sign up on their own, manage their subscriptions, update their payment methods or even pause their subscriptions if they have to. Freemium also works best when you have a self serve product and a focus on product led growth. Users buy differently today with end users having more control over the purchase cycle than ever before. Try before buy is a new norm in B2B. This is true regardless of whether you sell to SMB or mid market company. If you serve mid market or enterprise users, it's essential to build a sales team and have both sales and self serve approaches working together. A self serve approach will of course help you lower your customer acquisition cost by automating areas where a sales touch may not be required, making your business more efficient, especially now when cost optimization is key. And finally, our very own learning strategy at chargebee that paid off in the current quarter that we are in Q3, which is was that we took the cue that more people are spending time online learning through webinars, podcasts and investing in learning and development for both the internal stakeholders, that is chargebee's employees as well as our customers was absolutely critical. So we launched chargebee Academy with the first certification course in billing operations for users on our customer side with the intent of increasing product adoption. And we're also looking to roll out this to prospective customers as well. So one of the very interesting stories I have to share with you all is a French customer that has been quick to identify opportunities in this pandemic and adapted to changing their business model. So this is a customer who sells gourmet coffee to offices and workplaces with a B2B subscription business model. And when the lockdown happened and all offices shut, this customer was terribly hit and the revenue dropped. But they quickly saw an opportunity in these times and changed their business model to a B2B2C where they asked these companies who are already their customers to give gourmet coffee to their employees so they do not miss their office coffee and can relish it while working from home with a pure intent of increasing their employee engagement and experience. So this Customer beautifully leveraged ChargeBees gift subscription feature to enable this and we were so thrilled to help set it up for them. But this innovative adaptive strategy definitely brought a smile to our faces and I hope it did for you all as well. So with product analytics and vertical trends, Data told us that customers in specific verticals were seeing unforeseen growth and we wanted to ensure that we help them in the most effective and appropriate ways. At chargeby, we believe that data driven retention and growth strategies should be the norm to have a more sensitized engagement approach with our customers, irrespective of yes or no pandemic situation. So I hope this was insightful for everyone listening. I would love to take a couple of questions before we wrap up. Hey Lindsay, would you like to yes, I've got a question in the inbox. What type of retention strategies are SaaS companies using other than price discounts? Are you seeing anything more creative in terms of the tactics used to keep customers? Thanks Anuj for asking that question. So there are multiple strategies that I use at chargebee. As the Head of Customer Success that's definitely up. It's my responsibility so I.