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Overview

Managing churn among thousands of customers on your platform can be challenging. journy.io employs signals to consistently assess the likelihood of churn for each user and account. This article offers an example of what a playbook designed to address this situation might look like.

Preliminary assumptions

The concept revolves around initially identifying qualified accounts. In journy.io, the following steps should be taken:

• Stages should be set: See Stages

• Account signals should be defined for the 'Customer' stage, and churn scores to be calculated for accounts: See From Smart Signals to Conversion, Churn & Health Scores

In general, we also recommend you to check out general information about playbooks. See Anatomy of a Playbook

Anatomy of the retention playbook

We will be constructing a playbook designed to engage with promising trial accounts, addressing both converting and non-converting accounts. The final playbook will take on the following structure:

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Entry Condition

The entry condition for this playbook, checking if an account is likely to churn, comes down to:

• Checking if the account is in stage 'Customer'. This could elaborately be a paying stage such as 'Standard', 'Pro', 'Enterprise'....

• Checking if the account has a churn score that is higher than a certain threshold. e.g. 75%

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Main actions: Notification and User actions

Once churn candidates are established, there are a few things we could contemplate to do:

Send a Slack notification, announcing a churn candidate

Press the add action icon (+) and choose Slack action 'Send a message'.

A Slack popup will appear where you will be entering Slack channel, personalized message and a message color.

Add all users from the churn candidate account to a HubSpot static retention list

We are going to reach out to all users from this churn candidate account. To do this, start with adding action icon (+) and choose system action 'User action'.

You will now see all user-based actions related to your connected apps. For this example, choose HubSpot action 'Add to list'.

You will now have the option to select user conditions, and select the HubSpot list you want those PQL users from selected PQA account to be added to.

HubSpot will now do the necessary to start sending drip campaign emails for as long as those users are in that retention list.

Create a churn case for the customer success team

Finally, we want to make sure the customer team takes a closer look at that account, while mails are being send. We therefore will be adding a 'Create case' action through pressing the icon (+).

cont.

Now main actions have been defined, the playbook will be waiting until the account is healthy again, or not.

Goal Condition

The goal of this playbook is that the churn candidate remains a loyal customer, with a churn score that falls below a certain threshold —e.g. 35%— within a certain time frame.

• Checking if the account remains in stage 'Customer'. More elaborately, this could be one of the stages representing a paying tier such as 'Standard', 'Pro', 'Enterprise'...

• Checking if the churn score falls under 35%.

• Setting the time-out for this playbook to 21 days.

The goal conditions should look like:

Upon entering goal settings, you playbook framework should now look like this:

You now can start defining actions when goal is reached (Trial PQA converted to paying customer) or when not reached (Drip campaign did not work, Trial PQA is still a trial of churned)

Goal-reached actions: Notification

The moment you PQA became a customer, Goal-reached actions will be triggered. You here mainly want to clean up and notify your peers about a new customer.

Notify Team on Slack

This is practically the same sequence as the previous Slack notification:

Goal-not-reached actions: Add manual follow up task for CS

Whether your customer actually churned or a churn risk remains, let's tell the CS team.

Add a manual CS follow up task in HubSpot

When after a time-out, a once-promising trial account did not convert, you may want to ask the Sales team to manually follow up on the account. This is how it's done.

Add a HubSpot action 'Create a task'

Ands set up the task details.