Customer Success + Support: A Powerful Partnership
March 24 & 25, 2020
The Belo Mansion & Pavilion, Dallas, Texas
Join Francoise at ASPs 2020 conference: Customer Success + Support: A Powerful Partnership where she will discuss this and other important topics.
Learn more about the event here and see the full agenda and speakers.
You need 3 kinds of Customer Success metrics. Do you have all 3?
By Françoise Tourniaire, Founder and Owner of FT Works and Member of the ASP Executive Advisory Board
Customer success organizations usually maintain decent internal metrics, churn rates being the centerpiece and typically including more details on renewals, upgrades, customer scorecards, onboarding performance, etc.
But that’s only one of three categories of customer success metrics, the other two being customer metrics, metrics shared with customers and used by customers, and voice-of-customer metrics, metrics used by the larger organization to improve products and strategy based on customer feedback.
Customer Metrics
It may seem inappropriate, even rude to push metrics on customers, but they love it, at least if the metrics are useful. For instance, customers like to see their progress on:
- Usage: Are their users taking advantage of the product or service? Are certain groups or geographies heavy users? What parts of the product are most useful?
- Training: Are users taking advantage of learning tools? Are required certifications on track?
- Goal achievement: Are they meeting the objectives they had with the product? (This, of course, assumes that you bothered to ask them, recorded the result, and instrumented the monitoring!)
- Support interactions: Are support requests being handled swiftly? Are bugs getting fixed and enhancement requests implemented?
- Peer performance: How are they doing compared to other customers? Are they significantly ahead or behind in any area?
Note that many of the metrics above match what may appear in customer scorecards, but they would be presented in a way that makes sense for customers. Ideally they would be included in the customer portal and available in real time.
Voice-of-Customer Metrics
The customer success team is ideally placed to gather and structure customer input to improve internal processes. In particular:
- Sales: Are we acquiring the right kinds of customers? What profiles of customers are best suited for long-term success? What customers are most likely to renew and expand?
- Engineering: What products/product areas are particularly appreciated or not? This goes way beyond bugs (which presumably, would be reported from tech support’s experience) and uses support cases, CSAT ratings, and other means to probe the entire customer experience, not just bugs
- Product marketing: What do customers want next? As for bugs, formally-recorded enhancement requests are only part of the story. Also include feedback from CSM discussions, customer boards, etc.
Are you collecting metrics for all 3 categories, customer success, customers, and voice-of-customer? Tell us about your experience.
Francoise Tourniaire blogs on customer success and technical support topics on the FT Works website.
This post was originally published on ftworks.com
Customer Success + Support: A Powerful Partnership
March 24 & 25, 2020
The Belo Mansion & Pavilion, Dallas, Texas
Join Francoise at ASPs 2020 conference: Customer Success + Support: A Powerful Partnership where she will discuss this and other important topics.
Learn more about the event here and see the full agenda and speakers.
Related Posts
How IBM Uses Watson
The Service Innovation Series highlights examples of innovative approaches companies take to achieve service excellence. In this Service Innovation profile, we feature IBM’s use of its own Watson technologies as a platform to deliver a new approach to service delivery – Cognitive Support. Read on to learn about IBM Cognitive Support.
Top 10 Practices to Achieve Support Excellence
Technical Support Excellence is the achievement of the maximum positive impact on profitability and reputation of the company, product or brand being supported through the efficient and effective delivery of support. Consider the following 10 practices in your pursuit of technical support excellence.
ASP Announces 2019 Top Ten Best Support Websites
After our 21styear of this competition, we are happy to announce the winners for 2019.
ASP Wants to be the Hub of the Support Community
Our ambition is to become the hub of the support community. What we mean by that is we want to be the go-to place where you can find any and every resource that you need to provide state-of-the-art support. We know that we cannot do everything for everyone, but we want to be able to direct you to those who can.
How Machine Learning Might Offer Opportunities to Preempt Escalations
Machine Learning (ML) can help support organizations shift the paradigm from reactive to proactive support.
Where is Support Going?
Return to List of Recent Blog Posts ASP’s conference in March, hosted by ServiceNow in San Diego, was all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in support. This, plus many conversations that I have had in the last year with support leaders has got me thinking about where support is going. This is, of course, the kind of thing that ASP