I am very excited to share an update on our Global Customer Experience organization and some key cross-functional initiatives to drive customer retention.

Retention has been a significant focus for us this past year. We have explored how and why we lose customers and in turn have made several major investments in ensuring we are well positioned and doing everything in our power to help you achieve best-in-class customer retention and renewal rates.

The Why:

First off, why is this so important? Retaining our joint customers is one of the most effective ways to drive growth – a healthy customer base provides opportunities for cross-sell and upsell, and while new business is absolutely critical to our future, we want to ensure every Sophos customer you worked hard to earn, we work equally hard to retain and grow their investment in Sophos.

This is also an important part of our responsibility as a trusted cybersecurity vendor. Our threat intelligence tells us that customers who are running out-of-date or end-of-life (EOL) technology are an easy and often preferred target for attack. It is true to our core mission of ensuring a clear path to the most effective cybersecurity that Sophos customers have up-to-date, fully licensed protection and are leveraging our latest advancements to safeguard their data.

So, ensuring our customers renew BEFORE their contract expires is both good business and responsible cybersecurity practice.

The Investments:

In support of this goal, we have been investing in several areas:

• Building out our new customer and partner success function:
  We are building out our team of Customer Success Managers and developing digital- and human-led engagement models to help our partners and customers achieve the highest value realization in their Sophos solution across all segments. This team ensures products and solutions are successfully deployed, customers use all their entitlements, understand what’s coming on the roadmap, and drive healthy adoption practices.
• Growing our renewals organization and evolving to best-in-class renewal motion:
  Last year, we introduced a dedicated renewals team. As we are transforming the renewal process, we included all the feedback from our partners and distributors to dramatically streamline the renewal process. We are also happy to welcome Dane Johnson, who has joined us to lead global renewals. Under his leadership, we’ll be ramping up the resources and automation needed to help our partners and distributors secure more on-time renewals.
• Leveraging technology and process:
  The sheer scale of our business is a huge strength for Sophos but presents some unique challenges. Together, we support over 600,000 customers worldwide and we know that to do this well, we need to leverage technology more effectively. A big focus area for us is to further streamline the renewals, quoting, and order process, and we’re going to further simplify the way you transact with us.
• Rolling out new service offerings for partners to grow their business:
  We hear from you that you are keen to explore new security service offerings to expand your business. This year, we’ll be rolling out expanded service offerings and new partner accreditations that not only drive your revenue but improve the customer experience throughout their lifecycle – so this is a win for retention as well. Stay tuned for more updates on this.
• Our world-class support organization:
  Our support organization diligently engages both customers and partners on literally tens of thousands of tier 1, 2, and 3 tickets a month, ensuring an ever-improving customer satisfaction score – and we will be expanding the menu of services available from our Partner Care team to continue to improve the ways we are supporting you.

The Retention Program:

We want to be sure that every customer knows where they are in their contract with Sophos. Too often, customers are unaware that their subscription has lapsed or that their hardware license has expired, leaving them vulnerable to cyberattacks. To address this, we are rolling out improved in-product notifications in Sophos Central, alerting customers when it is time for them to renew through you, their partner. Many of you have expressed challenges when it comes to staffing your own internal renewals teams and the volume of accounts you must reach out to. We expect these advanced alerts to help create customer urgency and an inbound demand – from customers to you – for these renewals.

Then, if all the above efforts do not help us to secure the renewal together, we will take steps to ensure no customers are unknowingly leaving themselves at risk.

First off, we are adjusting our approach to enforce license compliance and will turn off specific functionality for expired contracts (past a standard grace period) across all products. This will ensure customers are aware their subscription licenses have expired and should be urgently addressed to ensure their security is maintained.

For further details on how this will work for firewall customers in particular, please check the recently shared partner portal updates as they explain the Firewall-specific changes.

In addition, customers with expired support contracts will no longer have access to Sophos technical support.

If, despite our collective efforts, the customer is well-past their renewal date, we will initiate one last outreach to protect lapsed customers – encouraging them once again to contact you and giving them an option to renew now via a customized link supported by a specialized reseller. This is a final attempt to win back these expired customers and secure future expansion and service opportunities for you.

We are kicking this off with a limited cohort of expired, very small customers, who have no current active Sophos contracts. We will watch these results carefully and plan to expand from there. And of course, if at any point, you want to re-engage with a customer, we will happily help you reinstate the customer for renewal.

Once again, we are making a big investment in helping you retain as many Sophos customers as possible, providing them with the best possible protection and giving you the opportunity for expansion.

If you have any questions, please contact your local Sophos representative or join our upcoming Quarterly Business Updates.