LastPass Achieves 29% Reduction in Cancellation by Building a Retention Engine with Digital Customer Success

When Jon Honari, Director of Global Digital Customer Success, joined LastPass at the end of 2024 to build a digital customer success team, he faced an ambitious scale challenge: LastPass served nearly 100,000 customers, but just 3,500 of them were actively managed, which made them hard to see, difficult to guide to value realization, and increasingly hard to drive toward renewal.

Less than a year later, after implementing a Digital Customer Success (CS) strategy and building onboarding and renewal around customer behavior from scratch, Jon’s team helped reduce cancellation rates by 29%, improve GRR by two points, and shorten onboarding for the most engaged admins from 52 days to as little as 10.

LastPass mission is to give everyone seamless access to everything they need to work, move fast, and stay protected serving nearly 100,000 B2B customers. When Jon joined in December 2024, there was no digital customer success function to speak of — he was hired to build one. The mandate was clear: improve retention across a customer base that traditional CS coverage couldn’t fully reach. Rather than optimize an existing motion, his team built onboarding and renewal from the ground up in Gainsight, moving from rigid, time-based programs to event- and behavior-driven ones that respond to what customers have actually done and where they need help next.

Digital CS at LastPass doesn’t operate alone. Jon’s team is one of three interlocking pillars in the customer success organization: Digital CS (his team) builds the automated programs, a peer-led Portfolio CS team runs the high-touch accounts, and a team of Customer Success Advocates handles the human side when a customer needs to reach a person. But before Digital CS existed, none of these motions were Jon’s — onboarding and renewal lived with the Marketing team, running as time-based sequences out of Marketo.

The programs Jon inherited weren’t broken; they were simply built for a different purpose. That approach gave every customer a consistent experience, but it couldn’t adapt to what each customer had already done or still needed to do to realize value from the product.

In onboarding, that meant admins often stayed in the same sequence for 52 days, even if they completed the most important setup actions much earlier. At the same time, the emails were walls of text, and, as Jon put it, it was genuinely hard to figure out what a customer was even supposed to do at any given step and move toward first value with LastPass.

But the deeper problem was visibility. The team simply didn’t have data on those ~96,500 long-tail customers. Before Jon’s team could redesign these critical lifecycle motions, they first had to work with operations and data teams to bring that customer data into a place where CS could use it.

The renewal experience exposed the cost of that rigidity. For example, some healthy e-commerce customers with a credit card on file — people who were going to renew automatically — were getting fourteen emails before their renewal date. As Jon put it, “these customers don’t need that.” In some cases, the volume of reminders was prompting customers to cancel simply because they wanted the messages to stop.

Rather than rebuilding everything at once, Jon’s team started by creating the foundation. That meant working with operations and data teams to bring long-tail customer data into Gainsight, then migrating the existing Marketo programs as-is to maintain continuity while they evaluated what needed to change. Once the data was in place, they began building each journey around customer behavior instead of the calendar.

One insight stood out. Working with LastPass ‘ data science team, they found that customers who completed three specific actions during their first 7 to 14 days were six times more likely to renew. Rather than designing onboarding around a fixed timeline, the team rebuilt it around those behaviors.

In turn, the new onboarding program in Journey Orchestrator is now event-driven rather than time-based: instead of a fixed 52-day track, it reads what a customer has actually done and routes them accordingly. Each email focuses on a single action that moves customers closer to value, and once that action is complete, customers automatically progress to the next relevant step. As Jon put it, “How do we design the email around that specific thing?” became the whole approach.

Behind the scenes, the programs grew more sophisticated. LastPass supports seven languages, so every build carries full versioning and advanced logic to decide which email a given admin receives. One of the newest onboarding programs became so complex — checking behavior at both the individual-admin and whole-account level — that it had to be split into multiple connected programs.

That intelligence also helps the team know when digital engagement should become human engagement. When a customer stalls, Gainsight triggers the right human follow-up with an automated call to action (CTA): for accounts with a CSM, it lands with a playbook and pre-populated emails. For accounts without one, it routes to a team of customer success advocates for a human touch. Evaluation checks run every eleven hours so customers who’ve already done what they need are closed out automatically, before a person ever has to chase them.

Renewal got the same rethink. Rather than relying on high-volume reminder campaigns, the team anchored on Gainsight’s trust-based messaging framework — timely, relevant, useful, straightforward — and led with value instead of volume. The customers who’d been getting fourteen emails started getting one or two that reinforced the value they were getting and gave them the information they actually needed.

The team’s new approach delivered results quickly. By leading with value and cutting the email volume, LastPass reduced cancellation rates by 29% year over year in a quarter or two. That single program change was a meaningful piece of the two-point GRR improvement the team delivered across the entire long tail in under a year, running as a small team against 100,000 customers.

Onboarding showed the same pattern from the customer’s side. The most engaged admins now finish in as little as 10 days instead of a fixed 52 — and once they’ve done what matters, the program stops and they can move to adoption with fewer unnecessary touchpoints. From there, LastPass can guide them toward the next best step, including LastPass University, which is built on Skilljar by Gainsight. And because customers who engage with LPU are retained at roughly 11% higher rates, LPU is now a deliberate next step in the onboarding path rather than an afterthought.

Then there’s the quiet win Jon is the proudest of: failed-payment recovery. Thousands of LastPass customers pay by card, and expired or declined cards were driving unintended churn that used to be chased entirely by hand. The team automated preemptive outreach for cards about to expire, plus personalized post-failure messages keyed to the actual bank decline code, with a CTA for a human to call if the card still didn’t clear. That automation doubled the team’s weekly recovery rate and freed up more than two full-time employees’ worth of effort.

With onboarding and renewal on a strong foundation, Jon’s team is turning to adoption, especially driving usage of a newly launched flagship product. But as the programs become more personalized, they also become more complex to maintain. LastPass supports seven languages, and some digital programs can include hundreds of email versions. Even a simple change, like updating a community link, can require the team to find and revise that link across more than 200 templates.

That’s where AI comes into play. LastPass already uses AI internally to speed translation across its seven languages and hold its brand voice, but looking ahead, Jon sees a path toward more agentic workflows where trained agents understand the outcomes a customer needs to reach and help guide them there with the right level of oversight. Jon is also watching Gainsight’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) journey and Admin Command Line Interface (CLI) as potential ways to build and maintain complex programs faster.