How Reputation’s CS team uses honest customer feedback to uncover hidden risks and build stronger renewal strategies

Summary

Despite a robust health scoring process, Reputation’s internal view didn’t always match their customers' reality. Their customer success team often faced surprise churn—marking accounts green while customers were actually preparing to leave. Clozd stepped in as an independent voice, conducting midpoint interviews that revealed true customer sentiment and uncovered risks hidden behind those green scores. Using these insights, Reputation was able to recalibrate their health scoring, identify churn risks earlier, and build stronger renewal strategies—ultimately protecting revenue and strengthening customer relationships.

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Getting caught off guard by “surprise churn”

Reputation’s customer success team takes pride in their strong customer engagement, and rightfully so: They have a robust health scoring process, and their customers’ health scores are routinely green. And yet—renewal conversations sometimes took a sharp, unexpected turn.

They found that there were discrepancies between their health scores and what was actually happening with their customers.

“We thought everything was well and great,” said Kevin Meacham, director of customer success at Reputation. “But then Clozd did some interviews, and a few of our strongest customers mentioned that they were planning on leaving.”

They were getting hit with what they called “surprise churn.” Their team had marked these customers green—they had very few support tickets, high usage, and multiple active users across the platform. Everything looked great on paper … but then, 30–60 days before renewal, they’d reach out to cancel with little warning.

“That’s never a fun conversation to have with your C-suite or executive staff,” said Spencer Eriksson, VP of customer success at Reputation. “They're looking at you and your team and asking why we haven't had these types of conversations to understand, and why we don’t have the ability to predict churn more accurately."

Using an objective third party to capture honest customer feedback

Reputation’s CS team had tried to run post-sale interviews themselves, but that DIY approach was unsustainable.

“We found very quickly that it was taxing and time consuming,” Kevin said. “We really wanted to find a way to scale this approach to make sure that we were uncovering potential risks from our customers as they were coming up for renewal."

That’s when they turned to Clozd. 

Besides having a bunch of work taken off their plate—like scheduling and conducting detailed interviews, organizing and delivering insights, and much more—they also found that their customers were far more candid when talking with a neutral third party.

“Just because you bring in a partner like Clozd doesn’t mean your CSMs are underperforming,” Spencer said. “It gives customers a safe space to be authentic without risking the relationship. That ultimately makes for a better experience all around.”

Through more than 50 Clozd interviews, the Reputation team has been able to:

• Capture unfiltered feedback that customers often hold back from their CSMs
• Pinpoint frustrations and risks that weren’t showing up in traditional health scores
• Build a clearer, more accurate view of overall account health

"We've gained a lot of insight from these interviews,” Kevin said. “We've been able to bucket these customers into high, medium, and low risks—and from there create action plans or save plays based on that sentiment in order to course-correct any customers that might be off with their health score."

Proactively creating a plan to improve customer retention

For Reputation, Clozd isn’t just solving the problem of surprise churn—it’s laying the groundwork for a more proactive, insight-driven customer success strategy.

“We’re already using Clozd post-sale and at renewal touchpoints, but we’re planning to expand into post-implementation and mid-contract interviews.” Kevin said. “The more we weave these insights throughout the customer journey, the stronger the outcomes will be.”

So far, they’ve been able to build proactive playbooks to address risks, resolve issues before renewal, and provide their leadership team with concrete, trustworthy insights.

One save in particular stood out: A customer was flagged in a Clozd interview, and within weeks they were able to resolve a critical bug, leading to a successful renewal.

“It gave our CSM the opportunity to loop in internal management and get the technical resources that they needed in order to solve a specific bug that was irritating this customer,” Spencer said. “We were able to solve that bug problem within the next 2–3 weeks, and then from there we're able to pick up normal renewal conversations—and we were actually able to renew that customer."

Besides protecting that revenue, this save also highlights the value of working with Clozd.

“The very first customer we were able to save because of the feedback we got from Clozd covers the entire cost of the contract,” Spencer said. “The visibility we get from Clozd would be difficult to re-create any other way.”

Get to know: Reputation

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Reputation provides an online reputation management platform used by enterprises across healthcare, retail, automotive, and other industries. Their platform centralizes customer feedback—from reviews, surveys, and social media—to help businesses monitor brand perception, understand the customer journey, and turn insights into action. Today, leading organizations rely on Reputation to improve customer experience, strengthen relationships, and drive growth across every stage of the customer lifecycle.

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