Designing against churn: three service interventions across the customer lifecycle
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
Reduced time-to-clarity in pre-sales from tens of hours to 1–2 hours. Introduced a usability monitoring system linked directly to the Product roadmap.
1 — Reducing unpaid discovery effort by an order of magnitude
Problem
It takes time and effort for a software company to understand how much budget a prospect is willing to invest for a custom feture, especially when they don't have their requirements in a prototype format.
Solution
I designed a structured discovery presentation and workshop, with the purpose to eliminate the time we spent on discovery efforts without payment / signed agreement. It's a DIY requirements tutorial for prospects, with the option to 'buy' our Discovery Workshops.
Outome
Reduced pre-sales discovery from tens of hours to 1–2 hours — and turned it into an offer prospects could opt into.
2 — Designing a Customer Success Vision & Plan
Problem
New enterprise clients often arrive with:
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).
Outcomes
Proposed and internally championed a CS Vision framework. Full adoption remains a roadmap item, but the usability monitoring system (Section 3) began delivering part of the intended outcome — surfacing user frustrations directly to Product and flagging at-risk accounts to CS automatically.
3 — 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.
Service Intervention
I designed and helped launch a recurring check-in on effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. 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.
Outcomes
Early churn signals and actionable input for Product and CS.