Top 10 Health Metrics Customer Success Should Be Measuring

By Jeremy Gillespie

Knowing the health of your customers should be at the top of you priority list. The problem? There are so many metrics, it’s hard to know what really matters. In this post, I’m going to cover the top 10 metrics you should consider as you try to understand health of your customers. 

The following metrics will allow you to understand the value customers are getting from your platform, and if they’re likely to renew or churn. An important note: These metrics depend on both product usage, as well as human interactions with CSMs. By using both, you can build a comprehensive health score that is more accurate than simply using product usage data alone.

1. Daily or Monthly Active Users

First, know what portion of your customers are using the product on a daily basis. For a high-level view, consider using Daily Active Users (DAU) divided by Monthly Active users (MAU). 

What’s the number you should shoot for? That depends on the type of company you have. It varies greatly depending on the business. Some variables to be aware of are: 

• Should users be logging in daily? 

• What do you consider an active user?

It’s important to note, what you define as ‘active’ makes or breaks this metric. If anyone logging in is considered active, this may become a vanity metric with no real value. Make sure you’re measuring a level of activity that produces value for the customer. 

2. Feature Adoption 

It’s great to understand if people are using your product, but we all know every feature is not created equal. Customers get more value out of some features than others. Because of this we need to define two things: 

1. What are the high-value features?

2. What percentage of users are using these features? 

This will show you if the features are being adopted, and if users are returning to these high-value features.

3. NPS

We’re not going to go into a lot of detail on NPS, since we’ve outlined it here. Just like other metrics, NPS is not THE metric to measure, it’s one of many to give you as 360 degree view of customer health.

It is important to note that adding a layer of context to NPS is a great way to gather more insights from the scores. A popular way to do this is to gather scores at different stages of the customer journey. 

4. Customer Communication

This depends on the support model for your product, but knowing how frequently customers are engaging with your team is important. As customers progress across their journey, you need to make sure they’re receiving the proper level of engagement to be successful. To properly measure this, you’ll need to know the frequency of communication across email, phone, meetings or chat.

Note: More is not always better. You’ll need to find the right balance for your customers. In addition, think about implementing a sentiment score to understand if these communications are positive or negative.

5. Feedback from Customer Success 

Who knows the customer health better than the people who’ve been talking to them? This is why you need to capture the feedback from your CSMs. Yes, this feedback is subjective, but it’s necessary for a comprehensive score. Typically, this score should be updated monthly or quarterly. For each score level, make sure you have clearly defined what it takes to hit that level across the team.

Note: If CSMs are measured against this score, it may lead to inaccurate scores.

6. Time To Onboard

We don’t want to say onboarding is everything, but…onboarding is everything. You should know how long it takes a typical customer to onboard and measure new customers against this. Improving onboarding is an ongoing process you’re revisiting quarterly to see where you can improve. Many companies strive to reduce the time to onboard, but that is not always a good idea. Since onboarding sets the tone for the relationship, it’s important to get the customer to see value as quickly as you can, but not rush the process.

7. Support Tickets

You should also pay attention to how many support tickets are submitted by the customer. Support tickets can be positive or negative, so make sure you’re taking this into consideration. Tickets can be for quick questions, report bugs, request training, or to provide feedback, so categorize them (if possible). As you gather data, you’ll be able to understand what the right number of ticket is for a healthy account vs. unhealthy account.

8. License Utilization Rate

If you have a product based on licenses you need to know what percentage of seats are being used. Knowing this will allow you to identify expansion opportunities, as well as customers who may not be seeing the full value because they’re not filling their seats. If you have customers who aren’t filling their licenses, the best case scenario is downsizing, and the worst case scenario is churn. It is better to understand what is happening early.

9. Budget Owner Engagement

Each of your CSMs should know who the budget owner is on each account. Keeping this relationship strong is very important for long-term retention. Make sure you’re tracking the last time you’ve engaged with key stakeholders, including the budget owner. If the relationship begins to become distant or they leave the company, this can signal a high-risk of churn. For ideas on how to develop a long-term relationship with budget owners, consider this class.

10. Late Payments

Customers paying invoices on time…we all know this doesn’t happen, but it’s still important to track. Each customer has a different reason for paying late, so it’s good to know both the reason for late payment, and which customers have outstanding invoices over 30 days past due. All customers with overdue payments should be considered at risk, until you know what’s going on.

There you have it, the top 10 customer health metrics you should be measuring. It’s important to note one last time -- for you to fully understand the health of your customers you need objective and subjective inputs. By measuring these 10 metrics you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the health across your entire customer base.

Want to know which metrics you should be tracking? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that helps companies build top performing customer success teams. We transform support into success by building metrics, goals, and processes that enable customer success teams to perform at their peak. For more information on consulting offerings or our leadership training program, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Jeremy Gillespie - Jeremy is a growth marketing expert who loves using complex data to build creative retention solutions. He is a founding advisor to The Success League, and is also the founder of Built to Scale, a consulting firm focused developing customer acquisition and retention programs. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and MBA from Point Park University. He's a proud former Pittsburgher, currently living in San Francisco.

Beyond Email: Ideas for Tech-Touch Customer Success

This week’s post is a redux of a previously published article. We have been getting a lot of questions on this topic recently so we thought it was worth the re-share. Enjoy!

By Kristen Hayer

I wrote a previous article about how to approach a Tech-Touch or One-to-Many customer success program. Since then, a number of people have asked about how to tackle various touch-points. It seems like most companies are pretty reliant on email, but customers are getting tired of full inboxes (I don’t blame them!) Here are some alternatives to email for your One-to-Many customer success program.

WEBINARS

While you may have webinars in place right now, they are probably geared toward prospects rather than existing customers. Consider adding a series for your customers that includes product best practices, customer case studies or industry thought leadership.

VIDEOS

Similar to webinars, videos create visual engagement, but they come across as more personal. Consider interviewing successful clients or providing product tips in a fun way. Get your most engaging CSMs to participate as hosts so that customers can get to know them.

PODCASTS

If many of your customers have a long commute to work (NYC and SF, I'm looking at you!) podcasts are an excellent option to create engagement. Again, get some of your CSMs to serve as hosts, and have them interview industry thought leaders or talk about best practices.

CUSTOMER FORUM

Leverage your power users by introducing a customer forum. This is a great choice for companies with an established customer base. Experienced users will help new customers get going and successfully using your solution with a little moderation from your team.

IN-APP MESSAGING

Your app is the perfect place to display messages that are tailored to your solution. If you know that customers run into snags in specific parts of your product, provide them with a walk-through or messaging at that point.

SURVEYS

Customer surveys can be related to touch-points or to actions in your solution, and can provide insight into both customer behavior and sentiment. Imbed surveys in your product, and at key touch-points in your customer lifecycle to see where you need to improve.

EVENTS

Do you offer local events or an annual conference? Invite customers and get them involved in relationship-building activities like training or a dinner. Are there industry events your company is involved in? Those are a chance to not only gain prospects, but to engage clients.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Consider the social media that best engages your customer base. LinkedIn and Twitter are obvious choices in the B2B space, but if your clients are on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, consider those as well. Posts can provide company info as well as links to case studies.

Clients enjoy hearing from companies through a variety of sources, and creativity counts. Your marketing team can provide ideas and help with content creation, so be sure to explore options with that group. Think beyond the email, and elevate your One-to-Many customer success program by incorporating some or all of these alternatives.

Need ideas as you’re designing your Tech-Touch Customer Success program? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that works with executives who are ready to build and grow a high-performing team. For information about our consulting services and training programs please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Kristen Hayer - Kristen believes that customer success is the key to driving revenue, client retention and exceptional customer experiences. Her areas of expertise include developing success goals and metrics, designing the optimal customer journey, selecting technology, training teams, and building playbooks. Prior to founding The Success League, Kristen built and led several award-winning customer success teams. Over the past 20 years she has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with growth-stage tech companies. Kristen has her BA from Seattle Pacific University and her MBA from the University of Washington.

Do Customer Success Leaders Need an MBA?

By Kristen Hayer

One of the questions I frequently get from customer success professionals and leaders is whether they need an MBA to progress in our field. I don’t think that you need to have a master’s degree to become a leader or even join the executive ranks, but I do think that in certain situations it helps. I have an MBA from the University of Washington (go Huskies!), but I didn’t get it until I was almost 40. I waited until I was sure exactly how it would benefit my career. If you’re considering whether or not an MBA makes sense for you, here are some things to think about.

ARE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT HOW LEADERS MAKE DECISIONS?

Other factors aside, the best reason to pursue learning of any kind is curiosity. Do you wonder how and why the leaders in your organization arrive at the decisions they make? Are you interested in finance, investing or mergers? Are you a natural learner whose undergraduate degree was in something other than business? If your answer to these and other business-related questions is “Yes!” an MBA may be an interesting degree to add to your education.

HOW FAR DO YOU WANT TO CLIMB?

If your goal is to manage enterprise-level accounts, but stay on the front lines of customer success, don’t bother with the MBA. You need experience much more than you need education and you won’t get that from a degree. If, however, your goal is to move into the C-suite (or become a VP at a larger, public company) you’ll find an MBA incredibly helpful, if not a requirement, for those roles. Essentially, getting a master’s degree in business teaches you to speak CEO.

ARE YOU RUNNING INTO CAREER BARRIERS?

I hate to bring this one up, but unfortunately it is still a reality for many of us. If you are part of a minority in the workplace, you may be running into barriers as you try to progress your career. It is definitely worth first looking at whether personality traits or other weaknesses are holding you back. If the answer is no, an MBA may provide the pedigree you need to break through that glass ceiling. I would recommend talking with a trusted advisor to help you explore options.

CAN YOU AFFORD THE TIME AND MONEY?

Master’s degrees are expensive. You need to be sure that you will achieve a level of income that allows you to pay back student loans and still have money to live and retire on. If you’re not sure about your career goal and the associated income, hold off until you have the data to do that math. In addition, be certain that you can spare the time. This is a 2-3 year degree, depending on the school and program. That’s time away from your career and the associated income.

DO YOU HAVE SUPPORT?

Getting your MBA is a rewarding process, but it is also challenging, time-consuming and stressful. If you have a family, make sure they are ready for late nights, time away, difficult assignments and exam stress. Include them in the application process so they know what they are getting into, and talk through your game plan. If you’re single it’s easier to carve out the time to get an MBA, but you’ll still need the support of your friends and family to get through challenging days.

If you do decide to pursue your MBA, be sure to choose the best possible school and program that fits your time, location and budget. Unlike your bachelor’s degree, which eventually fades behind your experience, your MBA always stands out. In addition, a big benefit you get from your degree is a network of business professionals. Be sure to consider that as you select your program. Finally, make sure you know why you are getting your MBA, and what you need to learn. That will help you focus on the classes and learning experiences that will benefit you the most.

Do you need help progressing your career in customer success? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers both a Leadership Training Program and one-on-one coaching. Let us help you learn and grow as a success professional and leader. Please visit our website for more information. TheSuccessLeague.io

Kristen Hayer - Kristen believes that customer success is the key to driving revenue, client retention and exceptional customer experiences. Her areas of expertise include developing success goals and metrics, designing the optimal customer journey, selecting technology, training teams, and building playbooks. Prior to founding The Success League, Kristen built and led several award-winning customer success teams. Over the past 20 years she has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with growth-stage tech companies. Kristen has her BA from Seattle Pacific University and her MBA from the University of Washington.

Hiring Great Success Engineers

By Shaun VanWeelden

Success Engineers come in all shapes, sizes, and skill levels, as do the requirements for your specific organization. Despite these sometimes large differences, the Success Engineering role has been quickly gaining traction within SaaS companies looking to bridge the gap between Customer Success and Engineering

In this article, I’ll be covering the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of hiring Success Engineers.

The Why

As Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle suggests, always start with “Why”. As you start to scale your CS organization, it’s common for the CSMs to start spending a lot of their valuable time simply trying to make customers successful from a technical perspective instead of focusing on the strategic value-adding conversations they really like to have.

This often takes the form of CSMs tracking down engineers or the product team to get their customer reported bug looked into, their question about an edge-case answered, or to have help on a call setting up 1 of your 10 integrations. This back- and-forth can quickly create unhelpful tension between CS and other departments as everyone’s trying to do their job.

At Engagio, we’ve found Success Engineers to be a crucial bridge between CX and Engineering that allows everyone to focus on what they do best. Below, I’ll go into detail about what a Success Engineer does and how to hire someone like this if these pain points resonate with you.

The What

Simply put, I consider a “Success Engineer” to be an engineer dedicated to supporting the Customer Success team. I prefer this definition because it could, and arguably should, encompass many different responsibilities.

Having a Success Engineer focus on becoming the go-to product expert, being the bridge between the CS team and the Engineering team, and building out tooling and infrastructure to scale CS efforts allows Customer Success Managers and others to focus more on providing strategic value and ensuring renewals happen. There are many similar “flavors” of technical people helping customers, such as:

• Technical Support Engineer – Managing the support queue escalations

• Technical Account Manager – Ensuring technical success from a strategic POV

• Solutions Engineer or Architect – Helping customers build out solutions on top of your product or platform.

• Implementation Specialist – Helping Customers get up and running initially, onboarding

• Technical Services – Delivering the technical side of professional services

While these are all relevant specializations, I believe the “Success Engineer” role serves as a nice hybrid of all of these roles that can scale well until the CS team is around 30-50 people, at which point, breaking out into the above specializations likely would make sense.

The Who

Success Engineers at the highest level are people who want to use both the technical and social “soft” sides of their brain every day. They have a technical background, but get immense satisfaction from helping others and seeing others succeed.

Wait, you mean those people actually exist?! Yes, they do. While the stereotypes that technical people don’t have the soft skills needed to interface directly with customers are all around us, I’ve learned there’s a real subset of people who excel at doing both and truly enjoy it.

I’ve found the background of Success Engineers varies immensely. Often times, people have tried out both technical roles and non-technical roles at different parts of their life, and now seek a role that leverages both skillsets. There is definitely not a cookie-cutter approach to the background strong candidates have.

While there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach, I and other Success Engineering leaders, frequently find coding bootcamp graduates and those who studied sciences like physics, chemistry, or things like human computer interaction to more frequently have this hybrid engineering + people mindset. When I evaluate Success Engineering candidates, I look for the following qualities:

• They quickly become “Power Users” of every product they touch. They enjoy digging into the details of how things work and are resourceful about finding out how to push products to do more. They are naturally “product- savvy” and have good intuition about how SaaS apps work. Being a true product expert of our application is the base on which everything else is built.

• They are technically capable enough to meaningfully debug product issues.

For us, this means they are comfortable writing SQL queries across our database and reviewing our application codebase to figure out the expected behavior. Being able to code enough to unblock oneself is highly valued.

• They get true joy out of helping others find success. For most people in Customer Success, this is a common trait and I think for Success Engineers, it absolutely needs to be there as well. I value empathy, kindness, and positivity very, very highly as well.

• Their communication skills and “presence” are also very strong. They can communicate over email and on a live call with authority and empathy. It’s important that they are confident in themselves and their knowledge because often times the customer is not sure what is going on themselves. They will need to become a very literal trusted advisor to the CSMs and the customers who are running into issues and having tough questions.

The When

Now that we have a better understanding of what a Success Engineer does, let’s discuss when you might need to hire a Success Engineer and when you probably don’t.

A Success Engineer could be a good fit for you right now if:

• CSMs need to go directly to the Engineering team for help on technical questions or issues

• Your product has very technical “in the weeds” integrations that require lots of debugging or deep technical domain expertise that’s hard to find in CSMs

• Your CSMs need to focus more on the relationship building and renewals as opposed to debugging, answering or triaging technical questions

A Success Engineer may not be a good fit right now if:

• Your application is less technical in nature. For example, most B2C apps and companies would not need a Success Engineer

• You have more than 50 people on the CX team already (this role is likely too much of a hybrid and you should specialize)

• To be successful in a CSM role at your company requires the technical skills and deep product understanding already. You already have a team of engineering-minded folks working as CSMs

The Where

Where does a “Success Engineer” ultimately report to and who should be hiring this person? It’s a really common question and I think you can make very fair arguments for the CS team, Engineering team, and a Support team if you have one. To decide for myself, I thought about the value a Success Engineer adds to each team and whose goals a Success Engineer’s goals match most closely with.

I consider a Success Engineer’s primary charter to be “Remove any technical roadblocks that get in the way of the Customer Success team delivering value, wherever those roadblocks may lie and regardless of the form they take.” While half of my time may be spent sitting with our engineering team debugging product questions or digging through our codebase to clarify how an edge-case works, all of that work is done in the interest of helping the Customer Success focus on what they do best. While time is split between teams and the responsibilities can overlap other departments, if you agree with the charter above, I believe the Customer Success team is the clear choice to own the hiring and enablement of Success Engineers.

It’s worth noting that as a Success Engineering team at Engagio, we fully participate in many of the engineering meetings such as the daily standups, sprint planning sessions, engineering updates, and more. At Engagio, we are considered full members of both teams and I have regular 1:1s with both our VP of Engineering and VP of Customer Experience, but ultimately, we are CX first.

If you’re exploring what a Success Engineering role could look like or how to hire, hopefully this helps a lot! I love talking about strategies, metrics, and more so if that’s something you’re into as well, please get in touch. My email is shaun.t.vanweelden [at] gmail.com

Need more help figuring out how to hire rock star CSMs? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a complete CS Leadership program which includes such classes as Hiring Top Performers and Planning a Team Structure. For more information on this program and our other classes and workshops, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io

Shaun VanWeelden - Shaun VanWeelden is the Senior Manager of Success Engineering at Engagio, a B2B SaaS Startup in the Marketing Technology space. He has been working as a Success Engineer and hiring Success Engineers over the last two plus years. He has spoken at Customer Success conferences around the nation about Success Engineering and loves to connect with other savvy and aspiring CS leaders.