Retention as the Growth Engine
As buying behaviors shift, keeping up with digital sales transformation is driving up overhead costs; some companies spend close to 40% of their revenue here and this is where Movate’s approach and digital interventions optimize success at every sales stage.
Movate SalesEdge streamlines, automates, and optimizes the entire sales lifecycle from lead generation to retention. By combining human expertise with cutting-edge AI-powered solutions, Movate helps convert more leads, and at a faster pace
On episode #7 of Movate Talks: Business Insights Unplugged, Jeffrey Farr, Senior Vice President at Movate SalesEdge, sat down with Chris Erickson-King, Head of Sales and Go-to-Market at Reef.AI, to discuss how AI-driven insights are transforming revenue retention.
The conversation explored how Reef.AI emerged from a real-world retention challenge at MuleSoft and evolved into a platform that helps enterprises predict churn and expansion opportunities months before renewal.
Together, Movate and Reef.AI are redefining what’s next for AI-enabled customer retention strategies where data intelligence meets human process excellence.
Key takeaways include
- Retention is the new growth frontier. AI-powered intelligence is now essential for proactive engagement.
- Data + Discipline = Retention Success. Reef.AI’s predictive modeling and Movate’s process excellence form a powerful combination.
- The next W(AI)VE™ is hybrid. Human-driven empathy, guided by AI insights, will define the next generation of customer success.
- Time is the critical variable. Predicting when churn risk occurs allows for timely, high-impact interventions.
- Partnerships accelerate AI maturity. Movate and Reef.AI together offer a scalable blueprint for the future of revenue retention.
The Origin Story: A Real-World Retention Challenge
Reef.AI’s journey began when Brent Grimes, the company’s co-founder and former Head of Global Customer Success at MuleSoft, faced the same pressure many growing SaaS companies experience: how to grow Net Revenue Retention (NRR) while controlling operational costs and headcount.
Despite having best industry tools/platforms, Grimes realized traditional methods couldn’t scale. His team needed a way to re-prioritize resources toward accounts that mattered most—those showing early signs of churn or untapped potential for expansion. By aggregating data from multiple sources and experimenting with machine learning, Grimes developed a model that boosted NRR by double digits without adding headcount. That experiment became the seed that grew into Reef.AI.
Inside Reef.AI: Turning Common Data into Predictive Power
According to Chris Erickson-King, the power of Reef.AI lies in using data that every company already has: CRM data, support tickets, product usage metrics, and sentiment scores. And transforming it into an AI-ready dataset that continuously learns and adapts.
The platform applies custom machine learning models tuned to each client’s unique data and NRR use cases whether it’s full-logo churn, down renewal, upsell, or revenue forecasting. But perhaps Reef.AI’s most significant innovation is time sensitivity. It not only identifies ‘why’ a customer might churn, but also ‘when’.
By predicting risk or expansion windows six to nine months before renewal, teams can act early, not react late. These insights are delivered directly into existing systems so customer success and sales teams can prioritize effectively without being overwhelmed by alerts.
Case in Point: A 5-Point Jump in Gross Retention
A standout success story discussed in the podcast is a leading fintech company serving banks and credit unions. The company had a rules-based health score that indicated general customer health but lacked predictive accuracy.
After deploying Reef.AI’s churn prediction model, the results were transformational:
- Gross retention rose by 5 points, from 85% to 90%.
- The model identified $2.3 million in at-risk revenue that the internal scoring missed.
- Dollar churn dropped by over 50% in the first year.
Beyond retention, the fintech company also gained a new level of forecasting accuracy, thereby predicting retained ARR and customer revenue 2–3 quarters ahead. This proved the broader business value of predictive retention intelligence.
Reef.AI and Movate: A Strategic Partnership for Scalable Retention
The discussion also highlighted how Movate and Reef.AI’s partnership bridges the best of data and process disciplines. While Reef.AI provides the predictive intelligence to surface the right signals, Movate SalesEdge brings the human and operational rigor to act on them effectively.
“Movate’s experience in managing global renewals and AI-enabled customer operations makes it an ideal strategic partner,” remarked Chris. Movate’s ability to deploy and manage client data systems helps Reef.AI accelerate onboarding and create AI-ready data pipelines faster.
Movate’s intelligent, semi-autonomous agents that can handle medium and low-risk customer churn scenarios. Reef.AI’s predictive data serves as the foundation for these agents, allowing Movate’s teams to orchestrate proactive retention motions at scale.
Together, the partnership enables a 360° retention strategy, which is a fusion of AI foresight and process discipline that moves from firefighting churn to anticipating and preventing it months in advance.
The Next W(AI)VE™: AI-Enabled Customer Retention
AI-augmented retention ecosystems are likely to be the next evolution in customer success. Reef.AI is now building a Net Revenue Retention Intelligence Layer, a metadata fabric that captures customer health and engagement data across systems.
This data layer can power future AI agents, digital customer success platforms, and automated renewal forecasting tools. As Chris noted, “Growth will depend on how well you leverage AI to cover the long tail of customers without sacrificing retention.”
By combining Reef.AI’s predictive modeling with Movate’s human-in-the-loop execution, companies can retain more customers, reduce churn costs, and amplify NRR growth.
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