Designing against churn: three service interventions across the customer lifecycle
Summary: Identified systemic churn causes and designed three service interventions — cutting pre-sales discovery from tens of hours to 1-2 hours, proposing a Customer Success vision, and launching an early warning system linked directly to the product roadmap.
Challenge
Clinked was losing clients due to problems that started long before poor usability — unclear goals at onboarding, misaligned expectations, and feedback only collected at exit, when it was too late to act.
Role
Sole designer. Identified the systemic root causes of churn and designed three service-level interventions — spanning pre-sales, onboarding, and ongoing monitoring — without a brief or mandate to do so.
Impact
Introduced a usability monitoring system linked directly to the Product roadmap. Reduced time-to-clarity in pre-sales from tens of hours to 1–2 hours.
1 — Early Warning System: Closing the Feedback Loop Before Clients Leave
Problem
Client feedback was collected mainly at exit, when it was too late to intervene.
Solution
I designed and helped launch a recurring check-in on effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.
Outcome
How it works: a fast “yes” path (happy path); and free-text only when issues arise. PM receives a weekly KPI on service quality and links to issues, to be linked to Rodmap.
2 — Designing a Customer Success Vision & Plan
Problem
New enterprise clients often have:
Vague business objectives
Unclear user expectations
Misalignment with product constraints.
Solution
I've proposed a Client Success Vision achievable by three key activities (business goals elicitation, users' goals expressed as a timely task plan, and assistance packages).
Outcome
Full adoption remains a roadmap item, but the usability monitoring system (Section 1 of this case study) began delivering part of the intended outcome — surfacing user frustrations directly to Product and flagging at-risk accounts to CS automatically.
3 — Reducing unpaid discovery effort by an order of magnitude
Read more about this initiative on its dedicated case study
Problem
It takes time and effort for a software company to understand how much budget a prospect is willing to invest for a custom feature, especially when they don't have their requirements in a prototype format.
Solution & outcome
I designed a structured discovery presentation and workshop, with the purpose to eliminate the time we spent on discovery efforts without payment or a signed agreement. It's a DIY-requirements tutorial for prospects, with the option to 'buy' our Discovery Workshops. Reduced unpaid effort to 1-2 hours.
