A lot of customers, little visibility
Jason Graham — My name is Jason Graham. I'm the VP of Customer Success at 8x8. We have about 60,000 customers, and our Customer Success team is relatively new in its current iteration we're about, we're just entering our third year servicing our customers.
With Customer Success being fairly new at 8x8, the biggest challenge that we had is we are coming from a company that is almost 20 years old and had a lot of tech debt and we weren't able to do a retention forecast to understand what was happening with our customers when they renew, and to understand what our churn forecast might look like.
And for us, retention is really the primary output and how we quantify our existence. And Planhat was able to do it in a way that no other company was able to do it. Prior to Planhat, it was Google Sheets, it was different trackers, it was Tableau, it was, you name it.
Greater visibility, greater flexibility.
Planhat gave us a little bit more flexibility than even Salesforce did because we can integrate not only the retention forecast with just an opportunity itself, but within the other aspects of what's going on within the customers.
So we can understand what our communications were with the customer, what their health is, all sorts of different aspects that we might not see in Salesforce where we're just looking at an opportunity and the events driving up to the end of that.
What Planhat allowed us to do is to really consolidate a lot of information into one place in a way that we weren't able to yet in a visualization tool. But beyond that, it's a tool that CSMs not only receive the information but input information. And so it's kind of bilateral. We can get customer health information within Planhat and we can input our feedback into Planhat as well.
And then that output can become available to whoever needs to view it. And so that solved our need.
Visibility to action to ROI
We were able to build a whole retention forecast, a whole retention pipeline, and then kind of extend beyond that to say, okay, well this is the end of the customer subscription, now let's move forward and understand what's going on with the customer, what the pros and cons, strengths, weaknesses are that lead up into that final event.
What Planhat has done for us over the last year since we've implemented it is about one or two percent of retention. And a percent or two of retention is quite a bit of money for us over a year. It might be a company's ARR at another company because we're a larger company. And so that's quantifiable output, that increased visibility across the spectrum of each department and the drivable execution towards that has given us dollars in return.
VP, Global Customer Success
8x8
Jason is a seasoned customer success executive with over 15 years of experience scaling global post-sales teams across SaaS and enterprise tech. As VP of Global Customer Success at 8x8, he leads a 50+ person org spanning CS, partner success, operations, and enablement—building a modern engagement strategy to improve efficiency, accountability, and retention. He previously served as Director of CS Strategy & Operations at BirdEye and led global success at BlueJeans by Verizon, where he managed customer care for over 5,000 accounts. Jason brings a deep focus on operational rigor and outcome-based engagement across complex customer portfolios.
