New business teams have long used forecasting to predict new revenue and It is indeed a numbers game.
Customer success can and should play this numbers game even better than their new business counterparts as there is much more data CS can utilize.
With the right metrics, CS should be able to reliably predict renewals, churn, up/cross sales and expansion ops.
Here are few of our suggestions on measuring the right data points:
- User Adoption & Activity Reporting – Your CS team should make sure new customers are using your product and are getting the results they paid for.
- Support Tickets & Resolution Outcomes – Customer Service requests are not always bad. The customer has to use your product to have a problem. Fixing issues quickly is what matters most.
- Marketing Engagement – Are your customers opening and clicking through product updates and release notices? – A little help from your friends in marketing goes a long way here.
- Customer Satisfaction & Surveys – This is the pulse of the customer. You should send users a regular questionnaire or use a simple rating tool to see how happy they are with both your reps and your product.
- Community Involvement – Many CS software’s enable users to create forums and help pages. Your CS team can also monitor review sites to see if your userbase is helping each other and what your product sentiment is.
- Invoice & Contract History – A happy customer pays their bills on time. Visibility on the current contract agreement with CS/Accounting is also crucial. If users are removing seats etc. or increasing/decreasing their contract value, this should be taken into consideration accordingly.
- Case Studies, Testimonials & Reviews– Data collected from this should factor into your health score. Users who graded positively on points 1, 2 and 4 above should be proactively approached by CS to ask for a review for your product or service.
- Executive Relations – Account managers should provide a score on how they perceive the client interaction. “To sell is human” after all, and our internal intuition on how customer interactions go, can be an often overlooked metric to evaluate.
- Self Sufficiency – Check if users are able to use the product themselves? If customers are constantly reaching out to CS for advice or if they request CS to do the job for them, that can be problematic in long term.
- Client Change – One of the metrics to track but a huge contributor to churn and retention. Client advocates are CS’s biggest cash cow. If possible, we should track and factor in the number of stakeholders and their engagement over the life time of the customer.
In conclusion – The above data points can be used to predict future success.
But 1st, we need to know what a healthy customer looks like for baseline. Then we can build a model with metrics most relevant to your product and ICP.
Then we need to monitor this data over a timeline that makes sense for your product. If we don’t monitor and take action, all this is for nothing.
