Abandoned: The Insidious Reason You're Losing Customers (and You Don’t Even Know It) from the book Support Experience.

The discussion centers on the "Yellow State Problem," a condition where a business performs sub-optimally but hasn't reached a total "Red State" failure yet. While the public saw the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) as a sudden "black swan" event, the author argues that the bank had been in a "Yellow State" for years due to outdated platforms and manual processes that led loyal customers to slowly abandon it long before the bank run.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Silicon Valley Bank Post-Mortem: Why long-term assets and VC networks couldn't save a bank that ignored the daily friction of its customer experience.

• The 7 Blind Spots: We break down the organizational flaws that prevent companies from seeing silent abandonment, including siloed insights, overreliance on lagging indicators like NPS and CSAT, and the mistake of optimizing for case deflections rather than solving root problems.

• Adoption vs. Retention: Why simply keeping a customer is no longer enough in the age of usage-based pricing—you must ensure they are actually using the product.

• The New Customer Journey: Moving from the traditional pre-sale/post-sale mindset to a "pre-land/post-land" model, where the critical moment is when a customer first signs up, not just when they pay.