Director, Customer Retention

Retention Leadership & Strategy

• Lead and oversee 3 Customer Care/Retention teams (40+ members) focused on proactive resolution, engagement, and churn prevention.
• Rebuild the org from "Customer Care” into a Retention & De-Escalation Center designed to protect revenue and reduce churn at scale
• Create and operationalize retention frameworks that eliminate friction, close expectation gaps, and accelerate adoption.
 

Early Adoption & Customer Health

• Drive early activation, onboarding success, and value realization across the first 90 days, the period most correlated with long-term retention.
• Identify customer-risk patterns early and design playbooks that trigger proactive outreach before churn happens.
• Ensure the team is skilled and certified in all onboarding SOPs, including KO Calls and Implementation Calls.
 

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Customer Success, Account Management, Support, Product, and Marketing to create a seamless, retention-driven customer journey.
• Translate frontline insights into product improvements, experience fixes, and revenue-impacting initiatives.
• Influence product roadmap decisions through customer insights, patterns, and root-cause analysis from frontline interactions.
 

Operational Excellence

• Own  and run a revenue-retention operating model with clear KPIs tied to gross retention, save rate, activation milestones, and churn attribution
• Own and improve the metrics that matter, including:
• Net Revenue Retention
• Early adoption rates
• Escalation deflection
• Establish a performance system that measures and improves the quality, coverage, and speed of customer save motions and optimizes capacity and routing models so the highest-revenue and highest-risk customers receive prioritized attention
• Standardize SOPs, documentation, and workflows that allow retention operations to scale efficiently.
• Implement forecasting discipline for churn and saves, improving visibility of revenue risk and enabling proactive interventions
• Champion automation and process innovations that reduce manual effort and improve customer outcomes.
 

Leadership & People Development

• Lead, coach, and develop frontline managers and team leads — building a leadership bench that can scale with the org.
• Foster a culture of high accountability, continuous improvement, and customer-centric problem solving.
• Own capacity planning, staffing forecasts, and headcount alignment to support organizational growth.
 

What You’ll Bring:

• 12+ of experience, a proven track record of improving Gross & Net Revenue Retention in a SaaS environment, with clear playbooks that moved the needle (early adoption, de-escalation, save motions, product activation).
• 5+ years managing managers, with proven success leading large teams of 20+ people.
• Demonstrated ability to transform reactive support or care teams into proactive, retention-driven organizations.
• Expert at turning reactive support environments into proactive revenue-saving teams, with measurable reductions in involuntary and voluntary churn
• Strong commercial mindset — understands plan mix, cohort behavior, discount impact, and how customer experience directly influences revenue outcomes.
• Deep fluency in early lifecycle metrics (activation, onboarding milestones, first-value attainment) and how these correlate to long-term retention and expansion.
• Proven experience building de-escalation frameworks, early adoption programs, or churn reduction initiatives with measurable results.
• Strong operational mindset with expertise in SOP development, process improvement, and scaling through systems and tooling.
• Exceptional coaching ability — you build leaders who build strong teams.
• Strong collaboration and stakeholder management skills across product, marketing, success, support, and operations.
• Highly analytical, data-driven, and able to translate insights into actionable strategies.
• Positive, resilient, and passionate about helping customers achieve long-term success.
• Experience/Education/Certifications Required:
• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Communications, Management, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• MBA or advanced degree preferred but not required.