inSided adds time limit feature to community platform due to customer complaints about “record-high retention rates”
[Amsterdam, Netherlands – 1 April, 2021] inSided, the leading Customer Success community platform for B2B SaaS and subscription-based companies has taken drastic measures to cater to customer needs as their Customer Success and Product teams were inundated with customer complaints about “record-high retention rates.”
During the first months of the year, companies that had predicted and planned for churn found themselves in an unforeseen situation: a 0% churn rate. While many companies would call this “a good problem to have” – the majority of inSided’s customers found themselves overwhelmed.
In response to the feedback, inSided built a new time limit feature, known internally as Kurfew.
Here’s what lead up to the decision.
Customer needs always come first
InSided’s Product Managers, Daniel Boon and Marion Frecaut, talked to a lot of customers to fully understand the issue.
“The reports coming from our CS team were as confusing as they were compelling,” notes Marion Frecaut as she takes another bite from her croissant.
Boon chimes in, “We thought they were kidding. Why would you want to limit peer-to-peer engagement?”
But the voice of the customer is what matters most, and as Boon and Frecaut diligently investigated the reason behind this rather peculiar customer need, they soon found that the harrowing customer complaints were valid and that there was in fact plenty of cause for concern.
One distressed customer who prefers to be anonymous states:
“We first came to inSided because everyone in SaaS sang their praises. A customer community is the answer to all your Customer Success problems, they said. Buy now, they said.
So I did.
And while I knew customer engagement is one of the key drivers behind retention, I still planned my budget and resources around a 5.7% churn rate.
When the numbers came in – or well, didn’t come in – I didn’t know what to do. No churn? Now what?”
Hearing these stories straight from the customers was almost too much for inSided’s CEO, Joris Dieben. “Self-service has gone too far,” he cries as he gives his unicorn calculator a spiteful look.
His consultant, Robin van Lieshout, says what Dieben cannot: “We’ve always known that customer communities and community-led growth should be at the core of a digital-led Customer Success model for SaaS. Especially in 2021. We just didn’t expect it to work so well that it would hurt our customers’ organizational structures. We truly meant well by creating a purpose-built Customer Success platform. We’re so sorry.”
Boon continues, “On top of the reports from our Customer Success team, our Product Ideation Module was filled with different versions of the same idea: give us a feature that reduces engagement. Ultimately we merged these 18 ideas into one, totaling 4678 votes. We couldn’t ignore it.”
So the Product Engineering team had no choice but to get to work.
Today, the team is delighted to deliver their most requested feature ever: time limit.
How the time limit feature works
The time limit feature is easy to access from the Control area. All you need to do is log into your inSided account, select Users in the main navigation and you’ll find the toggle to Enable Time Limit.
Once you have done so, AI will automatically calculate the most optimal time for your customers to spend in the community based on your company’s historical churn data. Once the limit has been reached, AI will freeze the environment and a timer will appear, giving customers a countdown for when engagement can resume.
Please note that this requires you to set up inSided’s Salesforce and Gainsight integrations.
Once your company has the structure in place to accommodate a 0% churn rate, simply turn it off.
With the time limit feature in place, normality can be restored as you’ll see your churn rate rapidly increase. Plus, your customers will spend less time in your customer community helping their peers and providing you with valuable feedback and instead devote more time to their hobbies and families. Increased churn for you, more free time for them! It’s a win-win.
Anika Zubair, VP of Customer Success at inSided, expresses her relief:
“I’ve worked in B2B SaaS for many years. I never thought I’d see the day when our customers would ask for less engagement. But I get it. Who knew a customer community would have this kind of impact on retention rate? This has been a great learning experience for the CS team in that we can now help our customers plan better. In fact, we’ve asked some of them to completely remove churn as a KPI. Why look at a number that doesn’t exist?”
How to get started
Log in and enable this feature today to allow for churn to continue as predicted.
Psst! Note that this feature is currently in beta and doesn’t work.
Not a customer? Book a demo today to discover how you too can run an organization with predictable – or zero – churn.
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