The Predictive Engine: Turning Customer Signals into Sustainable Revenue

OK, wonderful. Very excited to be here today and connect with all of my peers in customer success. I'm Andrea Wise, the chief customer officer of Tebra. I've been in the health care and SaaS industry for over a decade at various companies, three-time game site customer.

So really excited to be here participating in this amazing conference based in Southern California. And when I'm not doing customer success, I'm an avid dog lover. So I'm very excited to meet the puppies tomorrow. Hi, can you hear me OK as well?

Nice to see you all. My name is Megan Fitzpatrick. I'm our VP of customer success at Tebra. I've also been in the health care technology space for over a decade.

And I oversee our onboarding and our customer success management teams at Tebra. And they use our game site solution incredibly closely. I'm excited to share some of the insights and takeaways that our teams have identified over the last couple of years. I am from the East Coast.

I'm outside of Philadelphia. And outside of work, I have two young kids that keep me very busy. So I also love dogs. I'm excited for tomorrow as well.

Great. Let's dive in. So before we get into turning customer signals into actions, I wanted to give you all just a little bit of context about who Tebra is and help orient you to some of the experiences and business challenges that we've been working through over the past couple of years. We're an all-in-one solution for independent provider practices.

We serve a very diverse customer base, everything from a single practitioner-led practice all the way to 100 provider large organization. We also work with medical billing companies. So a lot of the content and the keynote around really needing to have strategies for the long tail really resonates with us. Some of the core products that we offer to our customers are EHR, practice management, so medical billing, practice growth and patient engagement, as well as some other platforms like payments and analytics.

OK, so today is really all around building a predictable revenue engine and turning data and customer signals into action. This is a really important topic and one that I'm extremely passionate about. I think if you all in the audience are really figuring out how to take your organization from reactive to proactive, how to scale your service organization, really figure out what's that right model for the large, large enterprise, but also that really small SMB scale, but while maintaining the quality of service, I think is really the challenge that we're all facing today. And then ultimately, we all need to drive outcomes, NRR, GRR, whatever those look like for your organization.

So today we're going to cover a framework that you can take back to your organization. First thing is how do you even identify those high-intense signals and where do you start? Then once you have those signals, how do you translate them into action? How do you drive and measure meaningful outcomes, make it repeatable?

And then certainly one of the most important parts is how do you get your team and your company aligned to this strategy? So our goal for today is really to give you some tangible tools of how to take this strategy back to the company that you all work at. But before we dive in, we want to take a quick poll. To access the poll, go into the app.

You can select the room. I believe we're in room 129. And what we want to hear from everyone today is what is the top priority that you and your organization are facing right now? I feel like we need that music.

Like, dee dee dee dee dee dee dee. Love it. Starting to see some of the results coming in. Retention, expansion.

Of course, we have AI. What else? All right, we'll give the group maybe about 10 more seconds. Still seeing some selections come in.

It'll be interesting to see who's going to win. Oh, it's up there. I didn't even notice that. OK, interesting.

I don't know that I expected that, but I'm actually very happy to see it. So it looks like growth and expansion, fast follow by improved retention, no surprise there, AI, all of the above, or something else. For those who might be a little bit brave out there, for anyone who selected something else, would anyone be willing to share? I'm just genuinely curious what that top priority for you is.

Yes? [INAUDIBLE] Love it. Thank you so much. Anyone else want to be a brave soul?

OK, no pressure. So I think the takeaway here is that we all have something in common. And actually, Chuck stole my quote. Improve churn, drive more customer expansion, do it more efficiently.

Said every tech CFO in the industry. And I think you're all experiencing this. We're experiencing this. And so I think it's really great to see we have some common ground and we can help each other solve these problems.

To dive a little bit deeper, some of the specific business challenges that we've worked through, and being totally transparent that we're still working through today, the company is accelerating growth. And there's a very heightened focus on retention. Retention's always been important. But I think we heard the executive from Okta say, we've all been through this evolution over the years.

It started with renewals. And it kind of transferred to NRR. Now we have AI. Retention is one of the largest growth levers a business has.

It's very expensive for many businesses to go out and acquire new customers. So it's absolutely imperative that we make sure we're retaining and really nurturing the ones we have. The business is scaling. And so the service model needs to follow.

I mentioned this a few seconds ago. But personally, for me, I think one of the hardest things about being a CS leader in a growing company is when you're really small, you can often afford to provide much higher touch service. Everyone gets a dedicated CSM. You might know all of your customers.

You can be really agile. And I think as you get bigger, us as in CS, we want to make sure that our customers have the absolute best experience. And often, that is at odds with scaling. Customers sometimes perceive that as taking things away, speaking to an AI agent.

I think we're all trying to figure out what that right balance is. With the human resources we have, we need to be that much more intentional and disciplined with where they're spending their time. We can't just have a QBR to have a QBR. We need to make sure that all of our customer calls and interactions are driving value.

We understand what those high value interactions are. And then lastly, I think everyone in this room can relate. We are experts of customer success, but none of us went to AI University. And probably for the first time in our careers, we're all figuring this out together.

And I feel vulnerable. I'm learning this. I'm not an expert of it. And I think it's great to be here and really get to talk about that out loud and swap stories.

So based on all of these business challenges, what we at Tebra really set out to do is figure out how can we become a more proactive organization? How can we really drive meaningful outcomes when it comes to NR, GRR, as well as expansion? And so our strategy was, hey, how do we use customer data in that context, as well as the technology and tools we have to build scalable playbooks and proactively improve these metrics and really be a value add to our company and also a value add to our customers? So again, this is all about turning customer signals into action.

I would say one of the biggest learnings and maybe most practical takeaways today is to get to leading and proactive, you really need to understand lagging. You need to understand what is going on in your business and just start with some of the really foundational basic questions. Who is churning? Why are they churning?

What are our customers telling us with their data? And so we have done a lot of work over the last couple of years cleaning up our data. Some of this is programmatic. Some of this is manual contact cleanup, verifying things.

We've changed the way we collect churn data. Just the questions we ask customers to get a little bit more specific. We're also leveraging AI to fill in some of the blanks when customers are not as forthcoming to tell us. And so really our goal, again, was to answer the question, who's churning?

What age are they? What specialty are they? What's the size of customer? Where are they in their practice maturity?

We work with a lot of startup practices, individuals who are just starting their medical practice, all the way to an extremely tenured practice. So it was really foundational for us to just understand who done it, right? Who is churning? Then second part was really breaking down where is the ARR lost coming from?

Is it downsell? Is it true churn? And where are those opportunities? We are sitting on a plethora of customer data, NPS questions, CSAT data, product usage, churn reasons.

How do we layer that in and cohort the customer base? And then lastly, once you have all of that laid out, who's churning? Why are they churning? Where is it coming from?

I'm kind of big on sort of the core W questions. Within the data, where can you make the biggest impact? There's always going to be 25 things we can do. But what are the things that are relatively low to medium effort and very high impact?

And that's where we found to be really successful in starting this journey. And the example that we're going to go through today is centered around churn. But we've leveraged this framework for other aspects of the business, including expansion. Our CSMs actually do have a selling responsibility, which is becoming more common today, but years ago was a little bit taboo.

So we're not going to go through the expansion example today. But if anyone is curious about talking through expansion, we will be here for the next 48 hours. And we're happy to kind of talk through that as well. So in going through our lagging indicators and really sifting through the data, one very, very clear opportunity for Tebra was we had a year one churn problem.

You can see here, year one is the line at the top. Relative to the other years, things look a lot worse. And every year, a customer got more mature on the platform. The retention improved.

So that led us to really say, what is going on in year one? And where are those controllable opportunities where we can build playbooks and start to drive outcomes? An example of some of the data that I talked through is really kind of understanding what's causing year one churn. So just to share some information with you all for us, what we saw is that in year one, there was a lot of business change.

That was really interesting to us because we thought, well, this customer just got sold by our sales team. How could there be this big business change? Wasn't the big business change transitioning to our software? But as I mentioned, we serve a lot of startup practices.

Particularly in COVID, a lot of folks deciding to go into mental health, kind of the rise of the nurse practitioner being able to practice directly in many states. And so we saw a lot of people coming into our industry. And so what we saw is a lot of false starts, practice readiness, people cutting cold feet. And so for us, that was a really tangible process gap that we kind of said, hey, partnering with sales, how do we make it easier for customers to feel confident starting their business and transitioning to us and using some of this software for the first time?

Second area I think everyone will experience this rate is product. We are a SaaS platform for us in the health care industry. Clinical workflows-- I mean, there are hundreds of clinical workflows. And even a primary care physician in Ohio and a primary care physician in California, same specialty, the way they do business is different.

And so really understanding those core workflows and our customers' needs, cost-- how do we make sure that the cost to value is aligned, and then also expectations gap. This was an area for us to collaborate closely with our sales partners to say, hey, you guys are selling the dream. We want to deliver the dream. But we need to make sure that we're setting really clear expectations on what's required to set up, what we're going to take on, what the customer is going to take on.

I see some of you shaking your heads. I'm like, we have some things in common. So this is just some of the data that we were able to surface to help us. Megan is really the brains of the operation of retention at Tebra.

So I'm going to turn it over to her to talk through in more detail how we actually built some of these playbooks. And what are the outcomes that we saw? Thank you. Awesome.

So now that we understood where and why customers were leaving, we launched a customer journey evaluation to really identify what are the most controllable opportunities that we can go after to make an impact and an improvement on retention. And so we really started at the beginning of the customer journey looking at that initial sales to implementation or onboarding handoff. And what we found was that there was a lot of inconsistencies in the handoff. We were asking our sales reps to manually enter information.

As Andrea mentioned, understanding the nuance of a business is so important in how we onboard and help them realize value. And if we weren't getting that information consistently and clearly, we were finding that we either missed the mark or we were re-asking the customer the same questions over and over again, leading to frustration and a lack of trust. We also found that with an inconsistent handoff process that there were a lot of misaligned expectations that a customer was coming in about, whether it be around the product, around the commitment that they were going to have to make to get set up successfully. And so again, that was one hot spot that we definitely identified we needed to build better programs around.

Then we looked at the onboarding journey itself. And what we found is similarly, we had a lot of unstructured processes or inconsistent processes. It's a really large team that we have in our onboarding program. And not everyone was doing the exact same journey at the exact same rate.

And additionally, we were very focused on the time to get a customer through onboarding versus the value that the customer was actually receiving. We then moved to the next handoff. Handoffs are definitely a theme. We heard it in the opening remarks today.

And as Andrea mentioned, a lot of our practices are pretty small. And so once they moved into our customer success model, they were moved into a digital or a highly digital model. And what we found was that was a really polarizing stark contrast to a very personalized sales experience, a very personalized onboarding experience, to then be moved into really a digital-led model. Left our customers really vulnerable and sometimes frustrated.

Year one, there's a lot even after that onboarding program. Our customer success management in that first year is so important in ensuring customers are continuing to adopt to the platform and find value. And we just found that our segmentation model, specifically in the digital area, was not hitting the customers at those vulnerable points in that first year. And then lastly, the renewal, the all-important renewal.

And at Tebra, we do have an auto renewal process, which leads to a lot of benefits. But we were finding that we were too reactive. And the conversations around renewal were really prompted by a customer hand-raising and saying, I'm not sure I want to renew or I have some concerns versus really getting ahead of that conversation and being more proactive around securing that renewal. So now that we had all those areas of opportunity, we really wanted to look at what are some playbooks and action plans that we could put in place to make the biggest impact on our customers.

And I'll share three examples today. As Andrea mentioned, this is iterative. There will be more playbooks and more action plans that we still need to develop. But we really focused and anchored around these three areas.

First was the handoff. You saw it on the last slide. There was definitely an area of opportunity for us. And so we started first by really standardizing the handoff.

What is the information we want to collect? How do we make sure it's in a place we leverage Salesforce that our onboarding managers or CSMs can see that information consistently? And again, once we started having a consistent and standardized handoff process, we then layered on automation and really making that something that the sales rep didn't even need to enter. So we leveraged Gong and Momentum, which are really screening all the information that our sales reps are collecting.

And we used that to automatically power those handoff notes. So we were getting more insights, more detail, in a more reliable manner. And our sales reps didn't have to have spend that time manually entering that information. And so what we found is by bringing those individuals earlier, particularly for our large customers, we were able to just create a much more cohesive experience for our customers, ensure that what their pain points and opportunities and needs were carried through easily throughout that customer journey.

And something that was really helpful for us is we leverage customers. We use Slack as one of our internal communication mediums. So we set up Slack channels for each of our large customers, where we have a mix of the sales rep, the onboarding manager, the CSM, maybe even product. And as simple as that sounds, I think something that was really a key learning for us was internally, we were our own worst enemy at times.

And something so simple as just better lines of communication internally can make a world of experience for the customer. And they're not feeling the pain of our own internal handoffs and communications. So that was a huge unlock and definitely something that really benefited us for some of our medium and larger customers. Moving over to the onboarding journey, we really did an overhaul of what our onboarding journey looked like and what did success look like.

So I mentioned earlier, we were a little too anchored on the time it took a customer to graduate. And we really pivoted by leveling up the data that we were receiving and identifying what was real value for a customer. And so we now look at our onboarding milestones and we look at specific product adoption milestones. And that's really anchored on, hey, a customer should not be graduating.

And so they've really shown that they're receiving that value from certain product adoption. We also recognize that not every customer is the same. So we do allow exceptions. And that's actually been really helpful in understanding how do different personas see value differently and how do we need to continue to iterate and refine what adoption miles mean most to different customers.

For our larger customers, I mentioned a little bit more on the handoff improvements, but we also really launched just an end to end upleveling of what does the service experience and customer journey need to look like for large customers. They expect more. They expect some things a little bit differently. And so we really anchored a cross-functional work stream with different leaders from sales, onboarding, customer success management product to put together just an upleveled service playbook for our largest customers with different SLAs.

We unlocked career pathing, so more senior folks were really being presented to these larger customers and just really making sure we were meeting customers where they are and had a strategy to support some of the customers on the higher end. And then the last thing I'll say just around our onboarding journey, but probably for our customer journey in its entirety, was just really better leveraging our tools and technologies and upleveling that tech stack to ensure that we are putting humans in the best place to be successful. And where their success really lies is not the repetitive manual tasks. We can use our tools and technology to do that.

How do we automate that work away and instead focus our humans on providing that highest level quality experience? And so we leverage our gain site success plans, we leverage Journey Orchestrator to automate different email campaigns, and we have CTAs to really ensure that we're meeting customers at the right time. And so just really removing that manual redundant work and unlocking our humans for the highest level of service. And then the last action plan I'll speak on today is just the rest of that year one.

So our onboarding journey at Tebra is typically two to three months, but adoption and value last well into that first, you know, throughout that first year. And so we really needed to reorient our segmentation strategy for our year for our CSMs. And so we launched a three prong segmentation model. We call it segmentation 4.0.

There'll probably be 10 more iterations of that over over the life cycle and just constantly iterating on what do our customers need. But what we found is that for our smaller practices really having like a hybrid model of a pooled CSM and digital touch points was really important and figuring out where to unlock our CSMs and those human connections throughout that first year. And so we launched a series of different CTAs around those vulnerable hotspots that we found through that customer journey mapping exercise. So for us about 30 days after onboarding, like I mentioned, that's a pretty it's still a stark contrast for a customer going from sales to onboarding to CSM.

And so we have a CTA that goes off 30 days after onboarding graduation to recheck in with the customer. See if there's anything they're still working through or their adoption or product products that they need to further understand to see value. And so I think we found that that checkpoint, for example, was was really successful. We have a really big product suite.

And so our customers, what we heard from them was trying to do it all and onboarding just what they needed to have the right foundation and see value. But true adoption needed to continue. And so there are certain products and even growth and expansion opportunities we wait to introduce until they have kind of their their feet on the ground and are really understanding the value of the product. And then we can introduce more to them.

And so that was another example of things that we wanted to hold off and introduce more strategically throughout that first year. So a lot of different action plans. I think just one thing that definitely stood out to us is not trying to do everything at once. Launch one playbook at a time.

Be thoughtful around what it is. Find some early adopters or champions within your team to test it out. Test, learn and iterate and then build upon to the next playbook. I think just being really intentional about focusing on one thing at a time, doing it well and measuring success was super important.

OK, so we can do all the playbooks in the world. But if they're not measuring, if they're not making an impact, then it's not really working. And so as Andrea mentioned, our North Star here was really improving retention. Gross revenue retention is definitely the metric we focus on, I would say the most.

And so we wanted to measure where these were these action plans, these playbooks driving value. And you can see on the chart on the left, really proud of the success that it has driven for the last four quarters we've been at or above plan and month over month. We're just consistently seeing our retention improve. We also mentioned year one being a hot spot, particularly the first six months, really.

And the chart on the right really shows our monthly churn rate. And again, the trend is down to the right over a very similar period of time. And so I think this was just a really good validation and proof point that the playbooks that we were rolling out, the action plans we were working on were actually delivering an impact. OK, so I think another critical piece specifically around retention is it's not just a customer success responsibility.

It really requires the entire company to be bought in and the belief that every single team and individual impacts the retention of our customers. And so I wanted to kind of share some of the organizational alignment components that were really successful at Tebra. I think the first one is really starting at the top, really ensuring that the executive team is preaching that strategy of retention and being really customer centric. And Andrea, as well as many of our other executives, I think really led by example there in turning this organization into a customer centric organization.

Our executives meet consistently with our top customers going across the country to engage and just make sure we have a really personalized relationship with them. We do all hands every month and we bring a customer in every single month to come talk to our entire company. And so our product team, our engineering team, they get that same level of customer engagement and they can really hear what's working well. And our customers are honest.

They'll tell us what's not working well. And both are super valuable. And so I think just having that visibility is really helpful and again understanding from the customer's mouth what they need and how our product supports them. Kind of in the same vein, feedback visibility, like how are we as CS, we sit on so much insights and we know our customers so well.

I think it's always really enlightening to kind of talk across the organization and that level of understanding doesn't always exist in every pocket. And so how are we sharing those insights in a consistent and repeatable manner? And so I think for us, like two areas I wanted to spotlight, especially given like the year one retention challenges, I think a close partnership with sales and having a really good understanding of what are our customers saying, what are those churn reasons, what are at risk customers. And so we have an ongoing sales and onboarding leadership meeting consistently where we track our largest customers, we track the churn reasons and we're sharing that information in a consistent manner to ensure that that feedback gets back to them very quickly.

And we can iterate and adjust as needed. Our product team, we're sharing product related churn reasons consistently and I think our product team has done an awesome job of really building a roadmap that's baked in the retention data that we're sharing, what our existing customers are sharing, as well as what our sales team is sharing on what could bring in new customers in the future. So just having a really balanced customer centric roadmap as well. The last two here I'll touch on briefly, but I think one thing that really stood out to us and reflecting on just some of the benefits and the learnings from this experience is just making sure your strategy is oriented to the outcomes you're trying to deliver.

And I think sometimes before, all the playbooks in the world, if you don't have the right leaders and the right roles, if you don't have the team motivated and incentivized for the right outcomes, it's going to be really hard to get that buy in and drive the business to the right level. You know, the business forward in the areas you need them to focus. So I think we've found a lot of success in identifying and up leveling our leadership, really looking at how our teams being bonus incentivized, like what are their KPIs and making sure that we are all pointing the ship in the same direction versus all pointing in different ways. And then I'll just touch on one customer program, but I think, you know, we can bring a customer in that's qualitative, but how are we really sharing the quantitative and the qualitative information in a consistent way?

And every month, our CS leadership team puts together a customer retention deck that we share across in a live meeting with our key leaders across the organization. We'll review qualitative and quantitative data around our retention. We'll share churn stories, save stories, and we'll really look and break it down on each business line and really ensuring that our knowledge and insights that we're collecting in CS are being shared across the entire organization. All right, and then one last slide and we'll open it up to Q&A.

But I think, you know, Andrea and I spoke a lot around, hey, what are some of the lessons that we've learned as we share? This is just one example of, you know, many different applications. And I think a couple of the things that we wanted to communicate today is one, just how you're thinking about a process and automation. What we have found to be really successful is, you know, starting playbooks manually.

I mentioned that earlier, but start manually, start fast, get it out, start testing it, and then learn and iterate versus trying to automate from the jump. Wait to make sure it's working before you spend the energy and the time to automate. The next one kind of goes hand in hand, but, you know, data and speed. Something Andrea loves to say is, you know, don't wait for perfect data, but have enough data to be dangerous.

And so once you have enough data to be dangerous, go out there and do test, learn and measure. Make sure you have really clear success measurements, but you will get faster, you will get further moving faster and testing those things quickly than waiting for, like, analysis paralysis and just mulling over the same data over and over again. Because the data is never going to be perfect. Andrea mentioned this earlier, but, you know, I think in going through opportunities, you're going to find there's so many opportunities.

So where do you start? And I think something that we've really anchored on is trying to find a few opportunities that are high impact, but low to medium effort. And I think that's really important in getting some quick wins on the board, getting something out to test. And I think it really helps orient and rally your entire team to be open to that change and lean in as you start working on more complex opportunities that may take more time to really show value.

And then last but not least, just having a really agile mindset. I think the work is never done. And I think that is really a culture and not being afraid of change, leaning into change. And I think we have found that the teams that have been the teams and individuals that have been the most successful embrace embrace change and realize that that's an opportunity to move the needle and that the work is never done.

And I think that mindset as you go into any challenge or opportunity is so critical. And so with that, I will pause and we will see a lot of questions coming through. So thank you guys for the questions and Emily's coming back up here. We'll try and answer some of them live.

Yeah, guys really appreciate it. Round of applause for our speakers. And if you haven't already, go into Slido within the room number in the pulse app and you can vote some of these questions or add your own if you haven't already. Let's start with I read this one earlier.

So your analysis showed your one churn, especially in the first six months, was driven by expectation gaps, product fit concerns and handoff challenges. Since many of these originate in the sales cycle, how did you create accountability and alignment with the sales team to help close those gaps? Yeah, great question. And I think, you know, a strong relationship between sales and CS is critical and having those relationships to ensure you can share the good, the bad and the ugly and have that what be well received is important.

And so I think we've spent a lot of time having onboarding in sales. I think I mentioned earlier, we have a biweekly call where we really do review this insight and coming at it from a place of partnership and collaboration. It's not pointing the finger. You know, I think what we found is a lot of times sales, if something was said incorrectly or it wasn't said incorrectly, the customer misinterpreted it.

So how do we best empower our sales team to be able to share the right expectation? And so I think we've done a lot of collateral content development and hey, how do we give a one-sheeter that you can easily share with a customer? So they really do understand what our onboarding journey is. And so, again, I think really coming from a place of it is a unified challenge of how do we ensure we're bringing the best fit customers in and then help them get set up successfully.

I think that mindset, partnership and visibility has been really important. Just to add a little bit to that, the best way to work with sales is to help them sell stuff. And so I know that sounds sort of obvious, but I think if you can really position yourself as a sales enabler versus a sales blocker, you get a lot more buy-in. Our sales team does have clawbacks built into their compensation model.

So if a customer does churn in the early lifecycle, they lose their commission on the deal. That is one just like really explicit way to kind of get them motivated to want to retain the customers. Our onboarding team also has a goal tied to customers in the first six months. So really shared alignment on goals.

But as Megan mentioned, not just pointing out the problem, but saying like, hey, this is an opportunity. We're going to help build some content or we're going to come do a training for the sales team because we want to help you sell more. We want to help you be more successful. We want to help you get that commission.

And in return, you're helping us get that retention. And so I think there are some incentive structures that you could potentially look at that may be effective and just also, again, really coming from a place of that shared goal. And we're here to help you sell, not here to get in your way. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So you described a major drop off when customers moved from that really personalized onboarding to the more digitally blended CS model. So how did you decide what level of human touch was enough for each segment in that year one window and what signals told you when a customer was ready to transition versus still kind of vulnerable at risk? Yeah, I could jump in. So as Megan mentioned, you know, a few years ago, you know, we had to make some challenging decisions and, you know, reduce headcount.

And so at that time, we changed our segmentation strategy. And the strategy at that time was you either had this really dedicated, you know, direct kind of CSM experience or you had a purely digital experience that did not work. And so, you know, we built what we call our hybrid team that's operating off of a mix of purely digital plays, but also human plays. How we identified, you know, what were the human plays?

So I think our approach is we want to start with digital. So really leverage, you know, enablement content, email campaigns. We have a community and really make sure we empower customers to be autonomous. But ultimately, there are customers that need our help.

So through just as an example, through our campaigns, many of them have the option like to raise your hand and say, yes, I would like to have a customer call or I would like to engage. There are certain campaigns where if a customer doesn't engage, we will then proactively call them because we think that data signal is so strong that even if they don't think it's important, we know it's important. And we determine what's important based on some of our data and analysis work. So in general, kind of from a sentiment perspective, we just heard a lot of customers say, I feel a pain after this onboarding handoff.

And so, again, that sort of inspired us to say, you know, we're going to check in with customers 30 days after onboarding. And now we have some data around, well, what are the topics of those calls? Oh, they, you know, we we help customers with getting enrolled through insurance. And so that's a really challenging process.

OK, that comes up a lot in the calls. Customers may still not feel fully trained. So now not only have we just identified, hey, customers are telling us that's an opportunity. Now we're getting even more deep and we really understand sort of topically what are those themes.

Similarly, using some of our product usage data, as I mentioned, one of our products is a billing product. You know, how practices do all their medical billing. So we know, right, like if you're not getting paid, red flag. And so I think it's really through a combination of that qualitative customer feedback on where they're saying they need help, as well as the quantitative feedback.

We've really continued to refine that digital strategy with a blend of purely digital plays, but also layering in that human touch. And we've seen actually very strong retention of this new segment, so much so that we're gearing up for segmentation 5.0 going into next year to really kind of balance. Like there is a portion of customers that may be equally successful in a more scalable motion. And that will allow us to even further allow our high touch segment to have smaller books of business and engage more deeply.

Love that. How do you share your insights with your product team? So is this is our technical or automatic process that you use for sharing it? Do you use any gainsite functionality for that?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. We use a mix of things. So we have a couple key programs.

One Megan already talked about, which is this monthly retention meeting. So I would say there's probably 50 people in the company that attend this meeting on a monthly basis. We are going very deep into our churn reasons by kind of product line, sharing success stories, lost stories and really giving the product team and the product leadership in that meeting. So we're going to be talking about some real concrete examples.

Similarly, we also host a monthly meeting around our top 25 ARR customers. For those meetings, we require the CSM to put together a very detailed summary of the customer. It is a lot of effort, but it's very effective. We're going into the workflows.

We're not talking about things at a high level and really making sure our product team understands those pain points and can start to connect the dots of like, you know, the customer's own meetings. This is a trend, and this might not just impact this one customer. It might impact, you know, hundreds of customers as product is preparing for the roadmap. We're also just giving them exports of data.

Here's what we're hearing in our MPS channel. Here's what we're hearing in our CSAT channel. They have the really then challenging job of balancing the roadmap between, you know, sales enablers, customer enablers, sort of new functionality. You know, all the data they need to help make those decisions.

And then lastly, we have an executive level QBR every quarter. They are in person. We have our product leadership team there, our CS leadership team there, and we are typically doing a voice of the customer session at those as well. These are not things that we had in place three years ago.

This has been a buildup over time as we've really realized, you know, where are those opportunities? And as Megan mentioned, just like I don't think we realize how privileged we are in CS to just be sitting on this wealth of knowledge, and it's not as intuitive to those who don't work in CS. And so to be able to influence and share, you know, there's a lot of power in that. I'm gonna ask one more question.

But before I do, I did forget to mention at the beginning that recordings for all the sessions will be available, including the slides as well as transcripts. So in future sessions, please shut down your AI note takers or whatever to make sure our Wi Fi stays available for the, you know, more critical stuff like slides or, you know, whatever. So I just wanted to give you guys all a heads up for all the sessions today. And then after the session is over, feel free to go out to the expo hall.

We've got I think the puppies will be there and all of our wonderful sponsors. Please visit them. Last question. I know I'm so sorry.

I want to give everyone enough time. All right. So can you walk us through how you automated the sales to onboarding handoff? So how did you do that?

What systems did you use? What was that process? Or how did you build it? I want to take this one.

Yeah, so I mean, I think first and foremost, really understanding so we did a lot of work, not just in onboarding on what's the information we need to have, but our sales team also recently went through an overhaul of leveraging like the spiced methodology and just having more consistency in how they were selling and the types of questions that they were probing for. So I know I said it before, but I think just like really starting with the standardization is so important and having that consistent baseline. We leverage the gong to gain say integration. So all of our calls are recorded via gong.

We then pull that in and we're leveraging we leverage momentum is the tool that then sits on top of those gong transcripts and is able to then take that and actually push it into Salesforce for the fields that we have mapped out as the critical handoff component fields. So I'm happy to kind of share more insight into that, but I think we're leveraging a host of different tools. But again, it all starts by having like the right place to put it and having alignment on what is the right information we're actually trying to collect. Kind of follow up since we still have a minute and 30 left.

How are you capturing the churn reasons, especially in the long tail where customers might not tell you what it is or how did you standardize those reasons? So closing the book on that. Yeah, I'll happily take it. I think it's still a journey and we have all these ideas on more ways.

We want to collect more turn information and retention insights, but we do capture that information. In Salesforce. That's where our retention teams are having the conversation. So if we are lucky enough to have a conversation, which we really do push heavily for we have standardized churn reasons sub reasons even like tertiary reasons where we really want to get deep.

So if it's just if it's product. What about it? Is it missing functionality? Was it was it like a technical issue and then what was the product in particular that we're talking about?

We have a really large array of products and so trying to get as granular as we can without missing like the higher level of sentiment. Is important. And so that's where we actually collect and store that information. If we're having a conversation, we do try and get that there.

I think some of the things that we are talking about is how do we collect that we leverage our customers if they're reaching out to us. There's like a web form. So how do we make that like a required field that we're collecting? If you want to submit the case that you want to cancel.

We're going to make sure you have to at least put some basic information in on what that is. And you know, I think some of the other things we're evaluating is if a customer is leaving sending a post, you know, a survey right. But like the response might be low, but if you get a couple of people who might share maybe more honest feedback once they're out the door than when they're still here. So having like that Avenue and then I think one individual, one of our leaders on our loyalty team did an awesome job of really building a model that we recognize we might get, you know, half 60% of our customers to have a conversation.

But for those that don't, how do we actually pull in? Our case data, our nps data and really all those other avenues and try and find some commonalities in the themes that are being shared and do our best to actually map with all the other data we have. What is the churn reason that we're seeing come through? Like more prominently.

And so I think looking at our case data, the comments, the notes, the descriptions has been really helpful in unlocking a whole another swath of customers that we didn't necessarily have. This is why I'm turning data for. Awesome. Sure.

No, and that leader is doing that with AI. So he's basically taking hey, if the customer is not telling me why they're turning, what's all the information I have about their journey? Let me use AI to summarize that information and come to a conclusion about why they're turning. So just a really cool.

I think effective application of AI. Awesome. Using basic gem like very simple, nothing crazy, very simple, simple AI application for sure. Wonderful.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Round of applause again for Andrea and Megan.