One of the most impactful avenues of revenue for Customer Success teams is around customer retention. After all, it’s easier to retain existing customers — who are already bought into the value of your business — rather than sell to new prospects.

But, just because someone’s a paying customer now, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll renew when their contract ends. That’s why it’s so important for your CS team to be proactive when it comes to your customer renewal strategy.

Lucky for you, we’ve rounded up 6 templates from Vitally’s Blueprints library — a collection of real-world playbooks from Vitally’s customers and our own CS team — to help you kick off your renewal strategy with minimal lift.

Let’s dive in!

1. Procurify’s “Would You Renew Today?” Survey Automation for Capturing Renewal Sentiment

Type: Playbook automation‍

Best for Customer Success teams looking to build a proactive process for customer renewals by gauging customer renewal sentiment early and at scale.

Created by Tomas Williams, Manager of GTM Enablement & CX Ops at Procurify, this Blueprint gives your team the ability to automate renewal sentiment analysis across your entire book of business.

Once an account matches the criterion you’ve set, a survey is deployed asking customers “Would you renew today?” If the answer is no, you can automate the actions that follow, including:

• Adjust account health score
• Update the account status to be “At risk”
• Create a task for the CSM to discuss the account with their manager during their next 1:1

“Vitally’s automation enables us to reach out to the correct person at the correct time with the relevant information to them.” - Tomas Williams

👉 Learn more about this template

2. Compt’s Customer Renewal Tasks Playbook

Type: Automated Task Management‍

Best for Customer Success teams looking to improve efficiency and productivity by automating manual, everyday tasks.

Built by Compt’s Head of Customer Success, Mary Migiano, this Playbook will help your team automatically manage renewal tasks, update customer data, and communicate with customers at scale.

For Compt’s Success team, there are many variables involved in determining how they handle renewals, including:

• Company size
• Account size
• Account health
• Contract terms
• Annual revenue

Using Vitally’s Playbook automation capabilities, Mary and her team are able to use custom workflows based on the different variables at play and approach each account with the appropriate tasks. Not only is this a great way to automate task creation across all CSMs and reduce repetitive administrative work, but it also ensures that you’re able to deliver a consistent customer experience at scale.

“Playbooks are hands down my favorite feature in Vitally. The automation within playbooks has made many of our processes so much easier.” - Mary Migiano

👉 Learn more about this template

3. Track and Measure Early Renewals

Type: Vitally Goals

Best for Customer Success teams looking to track and measure how their activities impact revenue and gauge forecasting accuracy.

Never let customer renewals slip through the cracks by ensuring they’re top of mind across all of your Account Managers and CSMs. This Playbook template gives Success teams the ability to track how often renewals are finalized 30+ days out.

Ultimately, this Playbook will give you the ability to better understand if your Customer Success activities are yielding the desired results, or if you need to spend time revamping your renewal strategy. Plus, you’ll be able to determine how accurate your forecasting is.

👉 Learn more about this template

4. Renewal Call Note Template

Type: Automated note taking

Best for compiling and displaying important customer details in one easy-to-access place.

Having important customer details — from multiple systems — in one easy-to-access place means that you’ll be able to set your Customer Success and Sales teams up for success with every renewal.

This Renewal Call Note template from Lauren Axworthy, Senior Account Manager at Vitally, ensures that your team has the necessary information they need to prepare for upcoming renewals and maximize revenue. Pull information such as:

• Account overview: NPS, Customer Health Score, ARR, next renewal date, and more.
• Renewal details: Consolidate details around the account’s sentiment heading into renewal, their plan requirements, and who needs to be involved in the renewal process.
• Product feedback: What feedback or feature requests have they historically shared that you can lean into during your renewal call?
• Opportunity identification: Are there upsell or cross-sell opportunities with this account? 

👉 Learn more about this template

5. Vitally’s Blueprint for Capturing Renewal Sentiment With Custom Surveys

Type: Custom Surveys‍

Best for automating data collection to better understand customer health scores, improve accuracy of revenue forecasting, and capture deeper customer journey insights.

Another approach for tackling your customer renewal strategy is through building and automating Custom Surveys. Within your Vitally Settings, you can create a Custom Survey Template and include high-value questions to determine customer health, like:

• Would you renew today?
• How has your experience been working with the product?
• Can you share any feedback about the product that led to your choice?
• What represents your sentiment regarding the value you are receiving?

From there, you’ll be able to launch automated Playbooks to ensure customer renewal or churn prevention opportunities don’t slip through the cracks. 

👉 Learn more about this template

6. Avoma’s High Touch Renewal Blueprint

Type: Vitally Projects

Best for Customer Success looking to build high-touch customer renewal experiences.

Created by Mark Stagi, VP of Customer Success at Avoma, this Blueprint gives your team the ability to build, automate, and personalize high-touch customer experiences for your top accounts.

With Mark’s template, you won’t have to start from scratch to build a standardized renewal playbook for your CSMs to use. His Blueprint contains action items for evaluating an account’s status, scheduling a Quarterly Business Review (QBR), and check-in activities leading up to the renewal date, ensuring your team stays on the client’s radar and provides the level of consistent attention they expect.

With this Blueprint you’ll be able to:

• Consolidate Milestones and Tasks to help CSMs prepare for upcoming customer renewals
• Standardize and automate task management for before, during, and post-renewal period

👉 Learn more about this template

Make renewals a breeze

These are just some of the many Customer Success playbooks available in our Blueprints library. Take a look into how other CS experts are tackling everything from renewals and client management, to automating your end-to-end new client onboarding process.

Have a Blueprint you’d love to share? What about advice for other CS professionals? Join our Customer Success Network to be a part of a hand-selected group of the sharpest minds in our industry.