[CASE STUDY] ‘Significant delinquent churn reduction’ and 25% fewer support chat requests – how Osano uses Userpilot to push for more upgrades and Product-Led Growth

If you work in SaaS long enough, you discover that churn has many creative ways of ruining your MRR graphs.
Some customers cancel on purpose (ouch), and others quietly vanish because their credit card expired and nobody noticed
(double ouch). That second group is delinquent churnand it’s exactly where Osano, a data privacy platform,
decided to fight back using Userpilot and a Product-Led Growth (PLG) mindset.

In this case study, we’ll break down how Osano used in-app guidance, resource centers, and upgrade nudges built in Userpilot
to achieve:

• Significant delinquent churn reduction (around 40% in failed-payment churn, according to internal reporting).
• 25% fewer support chat requests, which directly lowered support costs.
• More product-led upgrades and expansion revenue, with the product doing the heavy lifting.

We’ll walk through what Osano actually implemented, why it worked, and how you can steal the playbook for your own SaaS.

Who are Osano and Userpilot?

Osano: a complex, high-stakes SaaS product

Osano is a data privacy and compliance platform that helps companies manage cookie consent, data subject requests, and
global privacy regulations. It’s a mission-critical tool with a relatively complex product surface:
multiple modules, configuration screens, dashboards, and policies that teams need to understand and use correctly.

That complexity is exactly why customer education and smooth in-app experiences are so important.
If users get lost or overwhelmed, they:

• Ask the same questions in support chats over and over.
• Underuse key features that would increase their perceived value.
• Quietly churnsometimes voluntarily, sometimes through failed payments.

Userpilot: the in-app experience & PLG engine

Userpilot is a product adoption and in-app experience platform. It helps SaaS teams build:

• Onboarding flows, product tours, and interactive walkthroughs.
• In-app checklists, tooltips, slideouts, and upgrade modals.
• Contextual resource centers and in-app support hubs.

In short: it lets you educate, guide, and upsell customers from inside your app, without waiting for
them to read docs, attend webinars, or open marketing emails. That’s the heart of a solid product-led growth strategy.

The problem: delinquent churn quietly eating revenue

Before Userpilot, Osano’s growth story looked a lot like other SaaS companies:

• They were investing in acquisition and awareness.
• They had strong product-market fit.
• They still lost a noticeable slice of revenue each month to delinquent churn.

Delinquent churn (also called involuntary or passive churn) happens when customers drop off
because of payment issuesexpired cards, declined transactions, billing errorsrather than dissatisfaction
with the product. In many SaaS businesses, delinquent churn can account for a surprisingly large chunk of total churn.

At the same time, Osano’s support team was dealing with a high volume of repetitive questions:

• “How do I set up this consent banner?”
• “Where do I find this report?”
• “Why did this integration behave this way?”

These were good questions from engaged usersbut handling them through one-to-one live chat was:

• Expensive (support time isn’t free).
• Slow for users, especially across time zones.
• Preventing the team from focusing on higher-value, strategic conversations.

Osano didn’t want their growth constrained by a wall of support tickets and a leaky bucket of delinquent churn.
They needed a scalable, in-product solution.

The strategy: use in-app experiences to educate, retain, and upsell

Osano turned to Userpilot with a simple but powerful idea:
“What if the product itself could answer 90% of the questions and nudge users toward the next best step?”

1. Building a contextual in-app Resource Center

The star of the show was an in-app Resource Center created with Userpilot. Instead of forcing users
to search external docs or open a chat, Osano embedded help directly where users were working.

Key elements of their Resource Center included:

• Contextual help articles tailored to specific pages or workflows.
• Step-by-step guides for high-friction tasks like setting up consent banners or configuring privacy rules.
• Short walkthroughs or checklists for new customers going through onboarding.
• Links to deeper documentation and training resources for power users.

Instead of a generic “Help” link, the Resource Center was page-triggered.
When users visited a certain screen, Osano surfaced the articles and guides most likely to answer the questions they had
on that page.

The result? Users could self-serve in real time, without waiting for support. That alone created a better, more
product-led experience.

2. Reducing support chat requests by 25%

When Osano rolled out the Resource Center and in-app guidance at scale, they saw a
25% reduction in support tickets and chat requests.

That drop wasn’t just a vanity metric:

• Support costs went down, because the team handled fewer repetitive questions.
• End users got faster answers, because they could solve problems on their own,
  exactly when they needed help.
• Support could focus on high-impact casescomplex implementations, strategic customers,
  and edge cases that truly require human attention.

In PLG terms, Osano turned support from a constant fire drill into a more strategic functionwhile the product
quietly did more of the teaching.

3. Tackling delinquent churn with proactive in-app nudges

The next frontier was delinquent churn. Instead of relying solely on email reminders and billing system
retries, Osano used Userpilot to bring payment and subscription issues inside the product.

Typical tactics included:

• In-app banners or modals warning users about upcoming card expirations or failed payments.
• Guided flows leading users straight to the billing page to update their payment method.
• Clear, friendly copy that explained the impact of not updating billing (“Your access may be interrupted,”
  etc.).
• Segmented messages targeted only at accounts at risk of delinquent churn, so other users weren’t spammed.

By surfacing billing problems where users were already active, Osano made it much easier for customers to fix payment issues
before their accounts lapsed.

The payoff: Osano achieved a significant reduction in delinquent churnaround 40% according to their internal
case data and testimonials. That’s a meaningful revenue win that compounds month after month.

4. Using upgrade modals to drive product-led expansion

With in-app guidance and billing nudges in place, Osano also used Userpilot to push for expansion revenue.

They implemented:

• Upgrade modals triggered when users hit plan limits or tried to access premium features.
• Contextual prompts that framed upgrades around concrete outcomes (e.g., “Add more sites,”
  “Unlock advanced consent controls,” not just “Buy the Pro plan”).
• Timing logic so only engaged, high-intent users saw these promptsreducing noise and frustration.

This is a classic PLG move: rather than asking sales to chase every expansion opportunity manually,
Osano let the product show users why and when it made sense to upgrade.

The results: fewer tickets, lower churn, better growth

Put together, Osano’s strategy produced a powerful combination of outcomes:

• 25% reduction in support chat and ticket volume through in-app support and a smart Resource Center.
• Substantial reduction in delinquent churnabout 40% fewer failed-payment cancellations.
• More expansion revenue driven by contextual, in-app upgrade prompts.
• Happier customers who could self-serve, learn the product faster, and avoid surprise interruptions
  due to billing issues.

From a PLG perspective, these results translate to:

• Higher Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
• More predictable MRR growth without constantly increasing top-of-funnel spend.
• A product that actually feels easier and more supportive to use.

And importantly, all of this was done without overhauling the entire product. Instead, Osano layered
smart, targeted in-app experiences on top of their existing UXfrom onboarding journeys to billing flows and feature discovery.

Why this works: the PLG logic behind Osano’s playbook

1. Make the product your first line of support

A lot of SaaS teams still treat their app like a static interface and their help center like a separate universe.
Osano flipped that script: the app itself became the primary support channel.

By embedding answers, walkthroughs, and resources inside the product UI, they:

• Reduced friction for users (no need to leave the app).
• Reduced load on human support.
• Increased feature adoption and product mastery.

2. Catch churn risks at the point of use

Delinquent churn is often seen as a “payments team problem.” Osano treated it as a product experience problem.
When billing issues show up inside the appwhere the user is actually getting valueit’s far more natural for them to fix it.

This also aligns with PLG principles:

• You don’t rely solely on external channels (email, phone, sales).
• You use in-app context to make the next best step obvious.
• You treat every interaction as an opportunity to deepen engagement and retention.

3. Use segmentation and triggers, not generic “help”

Osano’s approach wasn’t just “throw a help widget in the corner and hope for the best.” It was:

• Segmented by behavior and lifecycle stage.
• Triggered by specific pages, actions, or risk signals.
• Focused on the most common friction points and repetitive questions.

That’s why their Resource Center could credibly cover “around 90% of the questions people ask on this page.”
It was intentionally designed around user behavior, not guesswork.

How to apply the Osano–Userpilot playbook to your SaaS

You don’t have to be a privacy platform to copy this approach. If you’re running (or working on) a SaaS product,
here’s how you can adapt the strategy.

Step 1: Map your top 10 repetitive support questions

Start by pulling data from your support platform or chat tool. Identify:

• The top 10–20 questions asked by customers.
• The product areas or pages where those questions originate.

These will become the first candidates for in-app guides, targeted tooltips, or Resource Center entries.

Step 2: Build a Resource Center that’s actually contextual

Instead of dumping your docs into a generic widget, follow Osano’s lead:

• Curate content for each key page or workflow.
• Use friendly, concise language and short articles.
• Include links to deeper docs only when necessary.
• Measure which articles get the most views and adjust over time.

Your goal is to cover 70–90% of the questions users naturally have in each context.

Step 3: Bring payment and billing issues inside your app

To combat delinquent churn:

• Show in-app notifications when a payment fails or a card is about to expire.
• Make it one click from the notification to the billing page.
• Give users a clear explanation of what’s going on and what happens if they don’t act.
• Use retries and smart timing in your billing system, but back it up with in-app messaging.

Treat billing friction as a UX issue, not just a finance problem.

Step 4: Layer in upgrade prompts where value is obvious

Finally, identify “aha moments” and usage thresholdsplaces where an upgrade makes the user’s life noticeably better.
Then:

• Trigger an upgrade modal when users hit key limits.
• Explain the benefit, not just the new plan name.
• Test different copy and CTAs to see what resonates best.

This makes expansion revenue feel natural, not pushyjust like Osano’s upgrade experience.

Additional experiences and lessons learned from this case

Let’s zoom out and talk about what this kind of case study teaches SaaS teams more broadly. Beyond the specific numbers,
Osano’s experience with Userpilot highlights a few big-picture lessons.

Experience 1: Delinquent churn is often underestimatedbut it’s low-hanging fruit

Many teams obsess over “why customers cancel” and run surveys, interviews, and long post-mortems for voluntary churn.
That’s usefulbut delinquent churn is often a faster win. Failed payments are usually not philosophical decisions;
they’re logistical accidents.

When you treat delinquent churn as a first-class growth lever (as Osano did), you quickly see:

• How many accounts quietly disappear due to billing friction.
• How simple UX changes (in-app warnings, better billing flows) can keep those customers.
• How much “free growth” you can unlock without spending more on acquisition.

In other words, you don’t always need more traffic or a bigger ad budgetyou might just need fewer silent failures.

Experience 2: Support volume is a product signal, not just an operational headache

Osano’s 25% drop in support chats wasn’t just a win for the support team; it was a sign the product experience improved.
When users can find answers without asking for help, it generally means:

• Navigation is clearer.
• Copy is more understandable.
• Help content is where users expect it to be.

Teams that treat support tickets as “noise” to be minimized miss the point. Each repeated question is a roadmap item:
a hint that something could be clarified or automated. Osano used Userpilot to close that loop.

Experience 3: Product-led growth is a team sport, not a magic buzzword

It’s tempting to think PLG is just “add a free trial and some in-app prompts.” Osano’s case shows something deeper:
PLG requires collaboration between product, growth, support, and engineering.

For this playbook to work, teams had to:

• Share data on churn patterns, billing failures, and support topics.
• Agree on which friction points to tackle first.
• Iterate on messaging, triggers, and UI patterns.

Tools like Userpilot are powerful, but they don’t replace strategy. The real value came from aligning the organization
around a simple idea: let the product carry more of the growth and support workload.

Experience 4: Small in-app changes compound into big business impact

A single tooltip will not transform your company. Neither will one upgrade modal. But when you:

• Continuously add contextual help where users struggle,
• Proactively surface billing issues inside the app, and
• Gently nudge high-intent users toward upgrades,

you create a compounding engine. Every month, a few more users stay. A few more payments succeed. A few more accounts upgrade.
Osano’s improvements in delinquent churn and support volume illustrate how these incremental wins accumulate into durable growth.

Experience 5: The best PLG stories are boring in the best possible way

There’s nothing flashy about expired credit cards or repetitive help questions. They don’t make for glamorous pitch-deck slides.
But addressing them is deeply practicaland that’s exactly why it works.

Osano’s “boring” winsfewer failed payments, fewer tickets, smoother upgradesare the kind of operational excellence that
separates steady, profitable SaaS companies from those that constantly chase the next big growth hack.

If there’s one overarching lesson from this case study, it’s this:
Product-led growth isn’t about doing more; it’s about doing the right small things, in the right place, at the right time.
Osano and Userpilot just happened to pick a particularly high-leverage set of “small things”and the numbers speak for themselves.