Often overlooked but crucial nonetheless, customer offboarding is key for any CSM team: it gives structure to the feedback you collect and lets you manage the customer's departure smoothly. Provided you handle it well!

For a CSM, losing a customer is always hard to swallow, and sometimes hard to understand. Soul-searching often follows quickly. You try to work out what you missed, or what could have been done, approached or explained better. Here are a few tips for handling this stage properly, so you gain in effectiveness, reputation and... humility.

Don't take it personally

A common mistake is to treat it as a personal matter. It isn't: it's very often (if not always) a decision driven by factors you can't always control or know about in advance. They're linked to your product or your company... but in the vast majority of cases, not to you!

When your ego takes a hit, you unconsciously make the departure harder for the company, for its image and for the customer's transition.

So you need to proactively remove anything that could make you emotional in these situations. That way, you'll be far better placed to understand the reasons for leaving and turn them into a strength when looking for the right solutions.

All is not necessarily lost!

First, together with your Sales and/or Account Manager colleagues, you can make one last approach to the customer who has announced they want to leave. Sometimes a cancellation request stems from a misunderstanding or a lack of awareness (for example, a new CEO who wants to challenge every tool in place, when you're actually one of the tools that will help with their new strategy... they just don't know it yet).

In that case, you need to go back to the person behind the decision and try to get in touch, presenting a review of results and proposing ways forward. If there's interest after that conversation, you can go as far as offering discounts or commercial gestures to win the customer back.

It's a card worth playing that can make the difference and help you "save" the outcome your customer currently has in mind. Once again, the idea isn't to obstruct, but to make sure the decision to leave is genuinely well founded. If it is, then yes, the offboarding process should run its course. But always try: it costs nothing, and it will always reflect well on your brand as a customer-centric company!

Go back over the customer's achievements and goals

If you get the chance to "defend your record", be strategic and don't come across as a last-ditch rescuer: it will work against you. To be sure you approach your customer the right way, you need to have agreed a clear, precise plan of action with your Sales and/or Account Manager colleagues beforehand.

You need to go back over the goals that were set at the start and use them to compare the customer's progress with and without your solution. You may choose to produce a deliverable the customer can keep. It's also an opportunity to gather extra material and content to share with your colleagues (Product, Marketing, R&D, Tech, Ops...).

You can also compare the MRR / ARR value that was defined with the value you've actually delivered to your customer. Since ROI remains central to how SaaS models are judged, this gives you added value that's easy to put to use.

Don't stand in your customer's way!

The art of successful offboarding isn't to put every possible obstacle in the customer's path, but to make things easy so they leave with a positive experience. Acting with goodwill and respecting the customer's choice always improves the impression they'll keep of your company. Commercially and strategically, this attitude may even encourage them to come back to your solution.

Manage and stage the departure

Looking after your customer portfolio means, above all, being able to assess over time the actions to take, and therefore knowing which steps and touchpoints with your customers need (re)working or improving. As soon as you notice that your customer is no longer responding in the same way or is showing signs of wanting to leave, take the time to suggest staging the steps.

Let them know you'd like to gather information about their experience, and take the opportunity to collect as much feedback as possible on the reasons behind their decision. This is probably one of the moments when your customer will speak most freely. They're generally generous with their time at this stage, since they too usually want to do things properly. It's by identifying the root causes of churn that you can genuinely improve retention.

Stay in touch with your customer

This step is often forgotten or sidestepped by CS teams, but it's very important to build your strategy on this final phase.

Some time after your customer has left, it can be useful to get back in touch and find out how they're finding life after leaving and/or after moving to one of your competitors. It's a chance to compare the competing offer and position your company better against your prospects' expectations.

You can use the opportunity to send a quick, simple satisfaction survey on how they felt about the offboarding. You make your customer feel valued and gather qualitative data at the same time.

If your customer agrees to receive communications, you can connect with the Growth or Marketing team to keep your former customer informed about product updates, news about your solution, its development, new features... You can also share key customer testimonials that prove your value and show that the points they raised when leaving have been taken on board.

This shows you're able to question yourself and that you're following a genuinely customer-centric strategy.

Conclusion

Just like onboarding, a customer's departure is a touchpoint in your customer journey. You should neither overlook the value it can bring nor rush through the steps.

Make sure you have a clearly defined procedure in your knowledge base and promote it and train your colleagues on it (across all departments). You'll reduce the risk of a botched offboarding and bring valuable feedback to your company.

Decide, too, who will be responsible for the customer's departure. Ideally, keep continuity with the account owner who handled the early stages with the customer. And finally, remember that offboarding isn't a failure in itself!

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Customer offboarding: how to handle a customer's departure well in SaaS