Motive builds technology to improve the safety, productivity, and profitability of businesses that power the physical economy.

How Motive Grew 80x in 3 Years with an Eye on Customer Retention

By keeping customer retention at the forefront of their operations, Motive reformed their automation and retention processes with Chargebee Retention to unlock growth at scale.

Before Chargebee

Inability to handle the large volume of renewals for their growing subscriber base

Lacked clear visibility behind customer cancellation reasons due to limited data analytics

Risk of high churn rate without a targeted, personalized, automated approach to customer retention

After Chargebee

Efficiently handled the growing wave of renewals via automation

Set up a constructive retention process and cadence to help deter cancellations

Analyzed data to offer targeted and personalized incentives to retain customers

See how Chargebee is a trusted partner in 6500+ growth stories

Realizing the potential for digitization in the physical economy, Motive (formerly KeepTruckin) was born — an IoT data platform that connects vehicles, equipment, and facilities to the cloud, enabling customers to automate their operations and grow without compromising safety, productivity, and profitability.


John Gleeson, the company’s VP of Customer Success, says, “We noticed early on that if we took great care of the end customer, they would eventually pull us into other market segments and help us grow. I joined Motive at an early stage when the company had about 5 customer success reps. Today, we’ve scaled that number to 120 customer success reps responsible for onboarding and retaining over 125,000 unique customers and counting.”



The Challenge: The rising wave of renewals and free users



  • While Motive had prioritized retention efforts from day one, their dependence on the workforce turned out to be a resource blocker.

  • Even with intense hiring, handling a wave of renewals for all their subscribers and mitigating the off-chance of cancellations becomes a challenge.

  • Additionally, they had to understand how to best address the needs of their various customer segments, such as multi-vehicle fleets and sole proprietors (drivers).



The Solution: A retention workflow to understand and manage churn closely



  • They balanced their workforce with the right automation to make their retention efforts more capital efficient. This was especially important given the pandemic and the current turbulent macroeconomic situation.

  • Found a way to retain their customers during the pandemic, a tool to help them deliver the right offers by being able to experiment with different offers rapidly. For instance, measuring the impact of various discounts on customer retention.

  • Developed accurate processes for renewing and deflecting cancellations.

  • Analyzed data to get insights into why customers wanted to leave.

  • Clarity in developing enhanced retention strategies to convert free users to paid users.



The Results: Significant growth through retention



  • Motive ensured they renewed customers during the pandemic by experimenting with and offering concessions.

  • While Motive was undoubtedly growing, partnering with Chargebee Retention helped them grow faster and more cost-effectively.

  • They built a retention and cancel workflow that helped them closely track and understand customer churn.

  • With the help of data analytics, they were able to bring structure into solving customer problems in real-time, thereby improving their retention rate.


By being proactive about customer retention, Motive showcased incredible growth in the SaaS industry by growing 80x in 3 years.

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Products Used

Chargebee Retention

We had to get good at serving all corners of the market - from long tail to mid-market commercial, through to enterprise - really quickly. That’s when I realized that there’s not a lot of information on how to do that from a retention angle. At that time, partnering with Chargebee Retention enabled us to get better at caring for all customer segments simultaneously, helping us to save a good chunk of our revenue when it really mattered.
John Gleeson VP of Customer Success, Motive (formerly KeepTruckin)