How SmartReach Reduced Churn by 35% | Full Case Study

Show me a B2B SaaS company with a customer churn problem, and I’ll show you a CEO who never talks to real customers or one who hasn’t stepped into their shoes.

Recently, Zomato’s founder once took on food deliveries himself to understand the challenges faced by delivery partners. 

By immersing himself in the frontline experience, he figured out inefficiencies in logistics, gaps in communication, and hidden friction points that weren’t visible from the boardroom.

The same principle applies to SaaS and customer churn isn’t just a retention metric, it’s a symptom of leadership being too far removed from customer realities.

That might sound harsh, but it’s the truth.

 Customer churn isn’t caused by a few minor product flaws or the occasional support mishap.  It happens when leadership is too far removed from customers to recognize the warning signs.

Why customer churn is not just a CS problem

Many companies treat churn as a customer success (CS) problem. 

But here’s the reality, churn is a company-wide issue affecting revenue retention and growth. 

When customers start leaving, it’s rarely just because of weak onboarding or slow response times. 

It’s because something in the company’s entire go-to-market (GTM) strategy, product, or pricing isn’t aligned with customer needs. 

And the root cause? 

Leadership that isn’t close enough to the customers they serve.

When senior management is not in touch with customers

🚨 Shocking customer churn statistics:

80% of CEOs believe their company delivers superior customer experience, but only 8% of customers agree. (Bain & Company, 2024)

52% of customers say they have switched brands in the past year due to poor customer experience. (Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report, 2024)

Companies that actively engage their leadership in customer experience see 2x revenue growth compared to competitors who don’t. (Forrester Research, 2023)

The average B2B SaaS churn rate benchmark is between 20-25%, with top performers achieving under 15%. (SaaS Capital, 2024)

When CEOs and other executives fail to interact directly with customers, dangerous patterns emerge:

• Decisions are made in a vacuum → Product and GTM teams operate on assumptions rather than reality.

• Problems get sugarcoated → Issues are filtered through layers of management before reaching the top, losing their urgency and clarity.

• Customer pain points are dismissed as CS problems → Instead of fixing systemic issues, leadership sees churn as a problem that customer success should solve.

And then, when customer churn rates spike, there’s a mad scramble to “fix” retention—usually with band-aid solutions like aggressive re-engagement campaigns or tweaks to the CS playbook. 

But by then, it’s too late.

How SmartReach reduced customer churn by 35% in 12 months? 

At SmartReach.io, we faced a similar challenge. 

Our customer churn rate was 27%, slightly above the industry benchmark of 20-25% for B2B SaaS. 

While our customer acquisition was strong, retention was a growing concern, and we knew a surface-level fix wouldn’t cut it.

The leadership team could have easily blamed customer success or support. Instead, we took a radical approach.

We implemented a holistic churn reduction strategy, addressing it from multiple angles:

🔹 Refined our ideal customer profile (ICP)

We moved beyond broad targeting and deeply analyzed customer retention by segment. 

Sales teams that actively engaged in multichannel outreach had the highest renewal rates. 

This led to a realignment of ad spend, content strategy, and lead qualification, ensuring we only acquired customers who would see long-term value.

🔹 Proactive churn risk assessment

We implemented a Customer Health Score system to identify at-risk accounts early, using a weighted scoring model that factored in engagement frequency, response times, feature adoption, and support escalations. 

Each account was categorized into risk levels, triggering automated alerts for customer success teams to intervene with personalized outreach. 

This also helped identify expansion opportunities by highlighting accounts with high engagement but underutilized features.

🔹 Sales compensation was restructured

We linked sales bonuses to customer retention at the 6-month mark. 

This forced reps to focus on long-term success rather than just closing deals. 

Additionally, we trained the sales team to say “no” to bad-fit customers—turning down deals that would inevitably churn.

🔹 Product roadmap became customer-driven

We didn’t just rely on feature requests.

We mapped every churn reason to missing features, usability issues, or poor onboarding experiences. 

For example, many churned customers cited limited CRM integrations, so we prioritized deeper two-way sync with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. 

More importantly, we validated each roadmap change by interviewing churned customers to ensure it solved the right problem.

🔹 Simplifying secondary domain & email authentication

One major pain point for customers was setting up and authenticating secondary domains and emails. 

Many businesses, especially those without dedicated IT teams, struggled with complex DNS configurations and email authentication protocols. 

To tackle this, we built a seamless authentication process where users could get Google or Maildoso domains authenticated and ready to use in just two simple clicks. 

This eliminated setup friction, reduced drop-off rates, and ensured better email deliverability from day one.

🔹 Engineering improved email deliverability

A major churn driver was poor email performance. 

Customers struggled with inbox placement, leading them to blame the platform. 

We invested heavily in our automated warm-up tool, enhanced blacklist monitoring, and stricter email authentication checks. 

The result? 

A 23% decrease in churn among users who previously faced email deliverability issues.

🔹 Onboarding and customer support scaled 

We introduced a high-touch onboarding process for new customers, ensuring they reached a key activation milestone within 30 days. 

For self-serve customers, we created behavior-based email sequences to guide them through setup. 

These changes led to a 15% increase in retention at the 90-day mark.

🔹 Pricing became value-based

Customers churning due to pricing were not necessarily unhappy, they just couldn’t justify the cost at their scale. 

We introduced tiered pricing based on usage and team size, ensuring smaller businesses weren’t priced out. 

This led to a 7% churn reduction among SMBs.

The result? 

SmartReach.io reduced customer churn from 27% to 17.5% in just 12 months, outperforming many competitors in our space. 

Every change was based on direct customer feedback, not guesswork.

A leadership framework to fix churn at its core

If your company is struggling with customer churn, the solution isn’t just to “improve customer success.”

The entire organization needs to shift its approach.

Here’s how:

1. Get the C-Suite on the frontlines of customer experience

Executives often rely on second-hand reports, which are inherently filtered.

To get real insights, leadership must immerse themselves in direct customer interactions:

✅ Sit in on customer calls – Not just for top-tier accounts, but also for churned and at-risk customers.

✅ Read support tickets and renewal objections – Look for recurring patterns and inconsistencies.

✅ Engage in customer communities – See firsthand what users discuss, praise, and criticize.

The key is removing the filter.

Many CEOs receive only polished summaries. Instead, they need raw, unedited customer perspectives, even when they’re harsh.

2. Create a culture of unfiltered feedback to reduce churn

If employees fear backlash, they won’t surface critical customer issues.

Creating a safe space for honest feedback is essential:

✅ Encourage brutal honesty – Anonymous internal reporting mechanisms can help surface recurring themes.

✅ Standardize feedback loops – Weekly leadership briefings should include direct, unedited customer feedback.

✅ Empower customer-facing teams – Support and success teams should feel confident in escalating major customer pain points without fear of pushback.

For example, at some companies, unedited customer verbatim is shared weekly with executives.

No summaries, no interpretations—just raw customer words.

3. Start engaging with customer retention data

Churn analysis needs to go beyond surface-level data.

Companies must combine quantitative trends with qualitative insights:

✅ Call lost customers – Automated churn surveys are not enough. One-on-one calls uncover hidden frustrations.

✅ Analyze support tickets deeply – Identify systemic issues, not just individual complaints.

✅ Track product usage drop-off points – Where do users disengage? What’s causing friction?

✅ Layer churn reasons by persona – Different customer segments churn for different reasons. Treating them as one group leads to ineffective solutions.

Once these insights are gathered, don’t just list them—categorize them into themes. 

Find the biggest drivers, then build targeted solutions.

Bottom line

Customer churn isn’t just a retention problem—it’s a leadership problem. 

When CEOs and executives stay disconnected from customers, churn becomes inevitable. 

But when leadership actively listens, engages, and adapts based on real insights, companies don’t just reduce churn—they build loyalty, advocacy, and long-term sustainable growth.

By taking ownership of customer retention at the executive level, companies can transform their approach to churn and significantly improve customer lifetime value (CLV) and net revenue retention (NRR) metrics that drive valuation.

Frequently asked questions: customer churn

Q. What is customer churn in SaaS?

Customer churn in SaaS represents the percentage of customers who cancel their recurring revenue subscriptions during a specific period. As we’ve explored throughout this article, it’s more than just a metric. 

It’s a vital indicator of how well leadership understands and addresses customer needs. High churn rates often signal that executives have lost touch with the real challenges their customers face.

Q. What is the average SaaS customer churn?

While 5% is often cited as the industry average, our research and experience suggest that top-performing SaaS companies maintain churn rates under 4%. 

However, this varies significantly by market segment, pricing tier, and customer type. 

Q. Is 20% churn high?

Yes, particularly in enterprise contexts. For B2B mid-market and B2C companies, annual churn rates exceeding 46% (or 5% monthly) indicate severe problems requiring immediate leadership attention. 

Enterprise-focused SaaS companies should be especially concerned with rates above 22% annual (or 2% monthly). 

At SmartReach.io, our initial 27% churn rate was a clear signal that we needed the comprehensive, leadership-driven approach outlined in this article.

Q. How to measure churn in SaaS?

While the basic calculation involves dividing churned customers by beginning customer count (e.g., 16 churned customers ÷ 400 beginning customers = 4.0% churn), effective leaders dig deeper. 

Customer Churn = 16 Churned Customers ÷ 400 Beginning Customers = 4.0%

Q. What is negative churn in SaaS?

Negative churn, now more commonly referred to as 100+% net revenue retention occurs when expansion revenue from existing customers exceeds losses from churned customers. 

Net Negative Churn = (% of Churned Revenue) – (% of Expansion Revenue)

It represents the ultimate goal of customer retention strategies. 

Achieving negative churn requires executive involvement in customer experience, creating feedback loops that reach leadership unfiltered, and building value-based pricing models that align with customer growth.