Having started with PayPal to process payments, Whiteboard had to rely heavily on manual billing, which restricted them from further enhancing their customer onboarding experience.
Soon, they moved to Braintree to process recurring payments and manage their subscriptions. Braintree lacked the solid automation to recover revenue from payment failures and send email communications for follow-ups. With inconsistent policies surrounding deactivation and cancelation, a member of the Whiteboard team had to spend hours chasing customers for payments, every week — not the best use of their time, which would otherwise be used for onboarding customers.
Whiteboard also found that they were not anchored to the right SaaS success metrics. In their early days, the acquisition of new customers was a bigger focal point than retention. “Anchoring to traditional, transactional metrics (like new sales) made us short-sighted. We weren't paying enough attention to churn or expansion or recurring revenue,” Ben Laughter, (former) VP, Customer Success & Operations at Whiteboard said.