A leading business process software company had a large group of enterprise contracts coming up for renewal in its next fiscal year. It wanted to understand, well ahead of those renewal dates, what separates customers who expand from customers who leave.
The company wanted to hear directly from the people who run its platform inside customer organizations: center-of-excellence leads and internal champions. It asked how strong executive support really was, how customers measured return, how they staffed and ran the platform, what would give them confidence to keep investing, whether the platform had become mission critical, and which alternatives they would consider. The interviews had to be anonymous, with the sponsor undisclosed, so that customers would speak candidly.
The study followed a one-hour interview guide in six sections: sponsorship and organizational health; financial and value pressures; center-of-excellence structure, usage and adoption; continuity and long-term success; mission-critical use cases and strategic outcomes; and final reflections and future intentions. A revised version added questions on staffing, operating model and alternative providers, and on whether process insight is a prerequisite for AI-driven automation.
Between late October 2025 and late January 2026, PP&A conducted eighteen interviews with customer-side leaders: center-of-excellence and process analytics leads, a global process owner, transformation and automation leaders, and executives in finance, procurement, supply chain, internal audit and internal controls. Their organizations spanned financial services, life sciences, consumer goods and retail, manufacturing and distribution, shipping, energy and software, across Europe, North America and Latin America. Tenure on the platform ranged from about eighteen months to more than a decade. PP&A captured every call in a structured notes workbook, updated in six versions as fieldwork progressed, and delivered it as an interview-by-interview findings record organized by the six themes.
The workbook gave the client first-hand evidence from eighteen accounts ahead of its renewal conversations. Organized by the six interview themes, it recorded for each customer how strong executive support was, how the organization measured and captured value, how it staffed and ran the platform, how it viewed price and licensing, which alternatives it would weigh, and what it intended to do at renewal. It also captured how customers saw the company's account teams and which competitive threats they were watching.
Because every call followed the same structure, the client could compare accounts side by side and see what separates customers ready to expand from customers at risk of scaling back. That was the question it set out to answer well ahead of the renewal dates, and the record gave it an account-level early read while there was still time to act.
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