Onboarding Is the Moment That Decides Everything

Rachael's first point is a mindset shift: retention doesn't start at renewal, it starts the moment the contract is signed.

Most teams treat onboarding like a project plan, a checklist to get through. In reality, it's the moment a customer decides whether you can actually deliver on what was promised.

At Evisort, that meant rethinking onboarding from scratch. Instead of a generic product walkthrough, they built a guided, certifiable learning environment called the customer academy, designed to build confidence rather than just show off features. Customers who complete it even earn a badge.

The takeaway: invest in education and empowerment from day one, and you get higher product usage, fewer support tickets and, most importantly, trust. That trust is what everything else gets built on. As Rachael puts it, get onboarding right and customers "forgive you a lot for a lot of things after that because you've established a relationship."

Post-Sale Is a Revenue Engine, Not a Cost Centre

One of the sharpest points in the conversation: customer experience isn't a service function, it's a growth function. Too many companies still treat support as a safety net, reactive by default. The best SaaS teams treat customer success as a genuine growth driver, with commercial goals attached, not just satisfaction scores.

In practice, that looks like proactively spotting upsell and cross-sell opportunities from product usage data, partnering with marketing on lifecycle content, and tracking leading indicators of account health instead of lagging ones like churn or NPS.

When customer success, marketing and product rally around shared KPIs like Net Revenue Retention, the business doesn't just retain customers, it grows with them. That matters more than ever as CAC climbs, outbound gets noisier, and renewals stop being a given. As Rachael puts it, her philosophy as Chief Customer Officer comes down to revenue, customers need to "stay and grow."

Build Feedback Into the Journey, Not Just the Calendar

If you're only collecting feedback once a year, you're missing the signal.

Rachael calls it "always-on" listening. At Evisort, feedback isn't limited to formal surveys, it's built into the journey itself: a short sentiment pulse after onboarding, friction alerts triggered by usage gaps, and quick check-ins after key milestones.

One simple example: her team uses a five circle slide in quarterly meetings, asking customers to rate the relationship red, yellow or green.

The result is real-time intelligence, the ability to adjust in the moment rather than fixing problems months later. It also builds internal momentum. When product, support and marketing all see the same feedback, they can course-correct faster, whether that's fixing a UX issue or updating messaging to match how customers actually talk.

AI Only Earns Its Keep If It Deepens Connection

AI gets a lot of hype, and Rachael was refreshingly straight about where it actually helps. Her team uses it for document intelligence, surfacing insights from legal and business documents that help clients cut spend, grow revenue and manage risk, plus for summarising meetings and automating reporting. But the point of all of it is the same: making human connection more meaningful, not replacing it.

One example: after using Gong to analyse customer sentiment at scale, her team didn't stop at the insight, they used it to trigger real, empathetic outreach.

That's the lesson most SaaS teams need to hear. If your AI investment is purely about internal efficiency, you're missing the point. The real value shows up when AI makes customers feel more seen, more supported and more set up to succeed.

As Rachael puts it, AI should "free us up to do, spend more time with clients, which is what we should be doing."

The rule of thumb: automate the context, personalise the connection.

Alignment Across Teams Is the Real Accelerator

A theme that came up again and again: internal alignment matters more than most teams give it credit for. Rachael calls customer success a "team sport." Support doesn't operate in isolation, and neither does onboarding, marketing or product.

In her view, customer experience is the output of everyone's work, which means every team needs to be aligned on what success looks like for each segment, what the key value moments are, and what tools, content or support customers need at each stage.

At Evisort, internal teams meet regularly to review customer journeys, not just revenue numbers, looking at drop-off points, common questions and feature adoption trends, all in service of a better end-to-end experience. This is where a lot of SaaS companies fall short. Without shared ownership, experience gets fragmented, and so does retention.

Advocacy Isn't Built. It's Earned.

Referrals aren't a marketing campaign, they're the outcome of real customer wins. Rachael notes that customers become advocates when they see tangible ROI, feel genuinely supported and trust you to help them hit their goals, and when they're proud to align their own brand with yours.

That flips the usual script. Instead of gamifying referrals with discounts or perks, the best SaaS companies earn advocacy by helping customers win in the first place.

In fact, Rachael notes that a significant share of net new business at her last company came from repeat or referred customers, something they tracked and called "virality."

Want more referrals? Don't build a better referral program. Build a better experience.

Final Thoughts

What made this conversation valuable wasn't just the strategies or the stories, it was the clarity Rachael brought to something a lot of SaaS companies still overcomplicate.

Customer experience isn't fluff. It's not a department. It's not a post-sale add-on. It's your competitive advantage, if you actually design it that way.

If you're scaling a SaaS business right now, here's the reminder: the most powerful growth lever isn't paid ads or a new outbound sequence. It's what your customer says about you after month one.

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Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Rachael McBrearty