Brightback is a San Francisco-based automated customer retention software company that helps high volume subscription businesses. Companies like Copper and Crazy Egg have used Brightback to retain customers by reducing up to 20% of cancellations. Interestingly, Brightback also includes a remote-first workforce of mostly Silicon Valley emigrants who now live across the globe.
And Brightback recently launched out of the gate with $11 million in total funding. And its customer retention automation software for subscription businesses is the first of its kind.
Index Ventures led the Series A round of funding. And existing investors Point Nine Capital, Matrix Partners, and Rembrandt Venture Partners also participated in this round. Prior to launching Brightback, CEO and co-founder Guy Marion was an EIR at Matrix Partners, the CMO/COO of Autopilot, and head of online sales at Zendesk.
“As an industry, we’re hooked on growing through acquisition alone, even though retention, not acquisition, is the bedrock of successful SaaS and subscription growth,” said Marion in a statement. “Businesses aren’t sharing that they typically see 30% to 60% of their customers cancel every year, which is eating away at growth. Brightback is the way out of the acquisition-at-all-costs mentality. We’re here to help companies leverage automation to enrich the user experience at critical points in the customer journey and retain users at scale.”
Brightback essentially fills the white space between CRM-based software that helps customers success teams manage high-value B2B customers and automation-based customer engagement tools for helping growth marketers acquire, nurture, and onboard new users. And Brightback has a goal of making customer retention every company’s new growth strategy by creating better experiences and targeted workflows that automatically retain customers for longer while delivering the insights needed for improvement.
“Intensely focusing on the customer is the most durable strategy to building sustainable growth and long term profitability,” added Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah. “Brightback collects and analyzes data on why customers might cancel, and automates processes to drive retention. They have an incredible opportunity to be at the heart of every subscription company.”
Brightback tested out its product with SaaS leaders like Copper, Crazy Egg, and SparkPost for nine months before launching its product. And the company was able to successfully pinpoint the reasons why customers want to cancel. With this information, Brightback is able to classify at-risk customers who signal concern but have not yet left. Then it intervenes automatically with targeted and contextual experiences.
“To win on experience today you need to pay attention to customers throughout the lifecycle and be in a position to respond quickly to any opportunities to expand or save customer relationships,” explained Crazy Egg general manager Suneet Bhatt. “With Brightback, we deflect one in four cancellation requests. More powerfully, we segmented all churn events and found that 40 percent are preventable. We restructured our team to jump on customers who never onboarded correctly, or need more time to learn, with a target of saving tens of thousands of dollars every month.”
For pilot customers, Brightback has reduced cancellations by up to 20% within two months of launching. And 67% of saved customers are still paying six months later.
