Customer Success, done correctly, has the potential to impact your business in myriad positive ways; from customer retention to advocacy, and from account expansion to CAC Efficiency.
So when I got this question in the comments section of one of my churn rate posts and started to answer, it turned into a post all its own.
The question was: “How is it possible to keep churn rates under 3% when we have an average of 10-15% in failed payments from Stripe and PayPal? Or are failed payments not to be included in the total churn?”
There’s a lot going on in that question… and the answer is far from simple.
And while this post is about Credit Card failures – the lessons herein relate to any subscription company that takes credit card payments and for any SaaS company, whether they accept credit card payments or not.
At the core of this post is the notion that a failed payment doesn’t mean the customer has churned… yet. Let’s start from there.