The account that was ready to leave, twice

01 / The problem

Adoption at 41%, and a renewal coming

One of the largest accounts in the region was quietly failing. Monthly active users sat at 41%, meaning well over half the people the licence was bought for weren't opening it. An account like that doesn't argue with you. It just doesn't renew.

Low adoption gets treated as one problem. It was three, and they needed different fixes.

• The tool had been introduced badly. End users met it as an announcement, not as something that solved a problem they had.
• There was real resistance to change. Not irrational either. People had working habits and were being asked to drop them for something imposed on them.
• The use case genuinely didn't fit. What had been built didn't match how the client actually worked. Part of the resistance was correct.

02 / Approach

Go and look at how they actually work

The third problem had to be solved first. There's no point driving adoption of a setup that deserves to be resisted. You'd only be persuading people to do their jobs worse.

So I went to the client. Several visits, on site, and mapped their processes end to end. Not what the implementation assumed. What actually happened. That produced a use case specification and a set of optimisations to what they were already running.

Only then did the adoption work make sense. I built a full success plan around the corrected use case, and ran change management department by department rather than as one company-wide push, because the resistance wasn't uniform and neither were the workflows.

03 / The reframe that did the work

Whose tool is it?

I met the end users directly, from the ground up. The change that mattered most wasn't in the configuration. It was in how the tool was positioned.

It had been presented as something the business wanted people to use. I presented it as something that would make their work easier. Same software, completely different proposition.

04 / Results

41% to 75%, and an account that stopped shopping

Monthly active users moved from 41% to 65% within two quarters, and stood at 75% by the time I presented the executive business review at year end. As usage rose, so did the return, reaching roughly 7x measured against the account's recurring revenue.

Having got genuinely familiar with how they worked, I was able to bring in further modules, including a service desk alongside the work management they already had. That's the difference between being a vendor contact and being a trusted partner. You get invited into the next problem.

05 / The second save

Winning the price fight eighteen months early

The first save carried them through their second renewal. By the third, the challenge had changed shape. They went looking for something cheaper.

That's the fight you can't win with a discount. They stayed because the platform had become genuinely valuable to the teams using it, and a cheaper tool that nobody uses isn't cheaper.

Which is the argument for treating customer success as prevention rather than rescue. The renewal was decided long before the renewal conversation.

06 / The part I'm proudest of

They came looking for me

By then I had moved to a different company. The account found out where I had gone, worked out which partner I was with, and got in touch themselves.

I onboarded them again at the new company. They're still with me now.

It's also the clearest evidence I have for the argument this whole site makes. The work that saved the account wasn't a rescue at renewal time. It was two years of understanding their process properly, and that's portable.