TL;DR:
- Warmly shares a case study about a customer, Strive, who churned.
- Strive's challenges with Warmly included a lack of immediate wins, platform slowness, and usability issues.
- Warmly learned from these issues and made improvements to their product and commitment to customer success.
- Strive's CEO appreciated Warmly's efforts and believes their product could still be beneficial for other organizations.
- Warmly offers warm customer engagement alongside AI and automation to prioritize customer success.
Anti-Case Study? Do you mean not a good story? Shared by us publicly? Are we out of our minds?
Yes. Below we’re going to post about a customer that churned.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the business world, and we believe there’s much to learn from our missteps and failures. You deserve the truth.
Buckle up, readers. In this blog post, we will cover:
- A partnership that didn’t meet expectations with Strive, who hoped to boost top-of-the-funnel conversions.
- Discuss Strive’s challenges with Warmly: a lack of immediate wins, platform slowness, and usability issues.
- Show how we improved our product and our commitment to customer success going forward.
Customer That Churned
On Feb. 27, 2022, we signed Strive, which offers employee experience technology. They were our 7th “Design Partner” (early customer) and approached us seeking a solution to increase their top-of-the-funnel conversions. Hopefully, they’d get more appointments and convert site visitors into clients.
Six months into their contract, the results were less than expected. Despite promising conversions from other customers, our collaboration yielded one meeting, which did not convert into a sale. We decided to interview the Strive team to understand why. We spoke with Strive’s CEO, Zach (our executive sponsor) and their Director of Marketing, Rachel (our champion) to get feedback.
Rachel had aimed to book more meetings by using Warmly to get notified when prospects were navigating Strive’s website, then Warm Call them immediately on the site. She told us:
- “[When trying to live chat with site visitors] what we noticed was that many people on our site would see the conversation prompt pop up and immediately exit. This gave us no opportunity to engage with them as they would close the conversation before it could even begin. Consequently, we were not achieving the results we had been seeking. In the end, we couldn’t justify the time our sales team was investing in this effort as it was not moving the needle.” — Rachel Bergman, Director of Marketing at Strive
We worked hard for them but ultimately decided to let them churn, return the second half of their annual commitment and instead ask them for a closer look at the issues so we could learn.
A Closer Look at the Issues
Problem 1: Winning Doesn’t Always Come Quickly
Warmly’s CSM set up Strive’s account in about 30 minutes, focusing on being a lightweight and an easy-to-use tool. But this was likely too fast. Strive’s CEO told us:
- “I think it probably would have been super helpful and given the team a ton of confidence if Warmly was in the driver's seat [from the beginning]. If we were able to get a demo booked or basically get us to a closed deal early then Warmly we’d be gravy the rest of the year. We needed to get a win early to get confidence.” — Zach Beegal, CEO of Strive
🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need to get success, fast! And they need our help to do it. Now our CSM team has an internal metric they track we call TTFW, or Time To First Win. With TTFW the CSM team is focused on their ability to work with customers until they’re getting value and using Warmly every day.
Problem 2: Platform Slowness
Processing millions of sessions for our customers turned out to be harder than we thought. Strive’s team experienced loading problems and had difficulty viewing visitor activity on the platform. The slowness made for a poor user experience which caused frustration and in turn, deterred their team from wanting to use it every day to nab leads.
🔮 Warmly Learning: Real-time engagement needs excellent speed and scalability. We then doubled down on making our platform way faster (10x faster actually).
Problem 3: Too Much Effort To Use
- “The concept of catching leads at the right moment and minimizing back-and-forth is impressive for driving top-of-the-funnel growth, but it was a lot of effort for us to learn that and take action on it.” — Rachel Bergman
When Strive told us that they were not getting use of the platform a key reason was that they were spending a lot of team trying to Warm Call everyone who came to their site. It was a lot of effort so we tried to help by literally putting “a man on the inside” and had one of our SDRs fill in for them to try it out for them too. Strive found our team's dedication impressive and appreciated the effort put into making the partnership work - and while the connection rates went up, we couldn’t do that forever (the cost wasn’t there). So we had to solve the problem of having the humans at our customer accounts only taking the time when it really matters - and at the right time of day for them.
🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need a level of enablement so they can learn a new motion and we can ensure it fits into their daily workflow. From there we decided to add AI and automation so we could actually just run the platform for Customers without Customers doing any work.
Problem 4: Strive Had Little Web Traffic
Strive is a startup and thus did not have a lot of web traffic. The problem with not having a lot of web traffic is that you’re limited in the number of daily attempts you have to get new sales from it. Our typical customers these days are more up-market — companies ranging from 50 to 500 employees in size, with web traffic typically exceeding 5,000 visitors per month.
🔮 Warmly Learning: We’ve historically worked better with larger companies. But because we want to work with smaller startups too, to address their needs, we’ve recently launched AI Prospecting (auto-email personalized emails to everyone who comes by your site). This automation empowers even small teams to expand their outreach efforts without exerting excessive effort. By automating these processes, we now help companies maximize their outreach potential and achieve a 10x increase in their outreach efforts.
So what happened with Strive? Churn & Refund
Strive, Design Partner #7 of Warmly, churned. And we don’t blame them for it!
Warmly believes in an excellent customer experience, and even though Strive still had six months left on their annual contract, we gave them a refund. We didn’t feel right taking their money when they weren’t excited to use it. Instead, we asked them to do this anti-case study.
🔮 Warmly Learning: Keep your customers, even those who eventually leave, on good terms.
Should Other Companies Use Warmly?
Yes, we hope so! While our collaboration with their company back in 2022 may not have produced the anticipated outcomes, the efficacy of our product today, given our learnings, should not be in question. Plus the churn was also more a matter of fit within their specific operational environment. Zach, Strive’s CEO, still thinks our product could prove beneficial for other organizations especially because of our dedication to our customers.
- “I had high expectations. Your sales pitch was very good, and I really liked working with your CEO Max. I do have to give you guys credit for the partnership mentality you had when things were starting to go south. Getting your COO involved, running email campaigns, and doing all of that for free. You did give it a good effort, so I can't say you didn't do that. It was going downward, and I was expecting you to cut bait quicker, but you gave it a real try, and I appreciate that.” — Zach Beegal
Before considering working with us, think about whether you would be a good fit; At Warmly, we specifically cater to businesses prioritizing warm customer engagement alongside AI and automation. If you make the choice to work with us, we promise to provide insightful metrics, an increase in pipeline and booked meetings. With Warmly, you're not just purchasing a product though — you're gaining a devoted partner committed to your success.
Have you ever had a churn you learned from?
Tell us your story to be featured by emailing [email protected].