How Streamlined Onboarding Reduced Churn By 9%

By David Duncan, VP Sales, Epos Now

When we first started Epos Now just over five years ago, we made the mistake of treating all customers the same. After the close we would hand the customer a toll-free support number with an option 2 and wait for them to call in. Sounds ridiculous looking back at this, but when you’re a cash-strapped startup without any VC advisors or funding, you do what you absolutely can to win the business and figure the rest out as you go. As you can expect, this process didn’t work out for us very well, and at one point our monthly churn was around 10 percent!  This was an insane figure which resulted in us losing 10 percent of our customer base every month. Over a six month period, we managed to reduce this number to below 1 percent. Here’s how we did it.

The first 30 days are critical to customer success and ultimately your company's retention rate. Typically, a customer will spend weeks evaluating different products in your marketplace. In tandem, a business will spend hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars acquiring each customer. Therefore, it makes sense to ensure that once the customer hands over their money, they are set up for success, since this will increase the lifetime value of the customer (LTV). The secret to customer onboarding success is understanding that the post-sale process needs to be broken down into stages just like the pre-sales process and treated with the same precision and velocity.

At Epos Now we have two different support teams to manage each stage. The first is an implementation team. The second is a service team. We break the 30-day implementation process down into three steps:

• Welcome Call
• Implementation
• Gone Live.

This whole process is automated through SalesForce CRM, so at any time the managers can see data such as how many accounts each rep is managing in each stage and where each one is in the process. Thus, it’s easy to spot if an account isn’t getting enough attention or stagnating in a stage for too long. Furthermore, the implementation managers proactively call out to their accounts every day, and set next steps/tasks in SalesForce to ensure each one is getting pushed down the funnel. To ensure that the reps are being held accountable for this process, the managers have a widget on their dashboard which shows them all accounts without a next step or no call within a 48 hour period (see screen shots for examples).

This entire process should take 30 days, and the same rep handles the whole process to avoid miscommunication and lack of accountability. Once the customer is set up and "graduated," if they have an issue down the line they can call back in and are handled by team 2: the service team. This is a whole other topic for a different day.

Throughout this period we also send out an email asking customers to rate us out of 10 to give everyone in the company an idea of our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and how we could improve the process.

I’ll finish with the fact that if you check out the Epos Now reviews online, we are the highest rated POS company with over 2,500 reviews and a 9.1/10 on Trustpilot, with many of the reviews complimenting this process above: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/eposnow.com

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David Duncan is the VP of Sales at Epos Now. He is an award-winning SVP for the organically funded 13th fastest growing tech company in the UK and fastest growing POS company in the world. He is a results-driven sales leader with a proven track record of 156 percent annual growth for 5 years in the UK before spearheading the US expansion in 2016 with 1,700 percent organic growth. Duncan was featured in the cover story of the October issue of Software Executive magazine (Playbook For Growing A Software Sales Team From 0-50). He can be reached at david.duncan@eposnow.com