When Someone Pays Attention, People Stay

When I came into the role at Square, the community was already running. Thousands of customers, active boards, a lot of conversation happening every day. What I started noticing pretty quickly was that a lot of that conversation was frustration. Customers showing up to talk about problems they were having, to vent, to find out if anyone else was dealing with what they were dealing with, and mostly just hoping someone would hear them.

The signals were all there. Nobody was really doing anything with them.

I started paying closer attention to which customers were showing up with the most frustration, the ones who seemed most at risk of walking away, and I brought that to our account management team. Instead of letting those signals sit in a forum thread, we built a process where account managers would reach out directly to these customers, not with an automated email or a support ticket, but as a real person who had read what they wrote and wanted to help.

Over the course of a quarter, we had a real system in place. We reached out to somewhere between 50 and 100 customers this way over the following year, and the conversations we had were different from the usual support interactions because they felt human. Someone at Square had noticed. Someone had read what they wrote and taken the time to call.

The results showed up almost immediately and kept building. The biggest one was $2M in prevented customer churn, which came directly from customers who had been flagged through the community and reached out to personally. Beyond that, overall engagement grew by 40% and new member retention improved by 30% in the first six months. The work also gave leadership visibility into metrics they hadn't had before, which shaped how they invested in the community going forward.

But the number that stuck with me most wasn't a metric. It was what customers kept saying when account managers reached out to them: they stayed because someone noticed. Because in a product environment where everything had been automated and optimized, a real person had paid attention and shown up for them.

The human signals are always there in a community. Customers tell you what they need, what's frustrating them, and what would make them stay, if you're paying attention. What I learned at Square is that the gap between a customer who churns and a customer who extends isn't always about the product. A lot of the time it's about whether they feel like anyone on the other side of the screen cares.

That's the thing you can't automate. And it's the thing I help organizations build toward.