M2 thesis: what customer retention adds after the event
M2 thesis written on the job: 12 interviews and 3 fiscal years of data to measure what retention adds to a digital solution.
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Context
During my apprenticeship at Microsoft France, I chose the customer retention process around a digital solution as my thesis subject. The question: to what extent, and how, does this process add value? I investigated my own workplace, under a signed confidentiality sheet. No internal figure is published here.
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What I did
I ran twelve semi-structured interviews with colleagues and customers (6 h 54 in total), four field observations and an observation of 80 messages across two channels, and I worked on internal data from three fiscal years. I coded the interviews with an 8-theme codebook and graded each piece of evidence on a P1 to P5 scale. A document benchmark of eight community ecosystems (Salesforce Trailblazer, AWS User Groups, SAP User Groups, Atlassian Community and others) and more than thirty references gave me points of comparison.
The work separates four levels that people often mix up: reach, exposure, appropriation and customer success.
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What came out of it
Three breaks explain why the process runs out of steam: no follow-up after the session (timing), no shared data (information), no relay at the customer (relationship). Value is built mostly after the event, not during it. I gave the company a steering recommendation for the next fiscal year rather than an academic report.
One limit I know about: my sample is unbalanced, with ten internal respondents for two customers, both highly engaged. I had no access to less engaged customers.