Customer Success Management metrics are pure bliss to a numbers geek like me. While everyone else at the company is focusing on “churn,” you and I both know that churn is the end result of all the other metrics!
What comes to mind is the Matrix digital rain. The falling green code (metrics) is a way of representing the activity within the matrix. The goal is to read the code (metrics) to infer actionable data.
Let’s use the example of churn. It doesn’t matter if your company uses Net VS Gross revenue churn or something else entirely; those numbers don’t offer clear guidance for what actions to take next.
So, what do we do?
We drill down!
For these purposes, we are going to use a fictitious Customer Success SaaS business called “Kick SaaS”. Kick SaaS has a company-wide meeting and announces that the current monthly churn percentage increased by 2%!
The CEO may ask, “how are you going to react to this churn?”
You being the Jill/Johnny on the spot person you are, could stand up and boldly state, “This came as no surprise, churn is almost entirely indicative of past events and thus, I will not be reacting to this specific announcement.” (Cue the shock!)
But before you can continue, the CTO blurts out, “we spent hundreds of hours providing you with dozens of reports, are you missing information?”
You respond: “We have all the information we need and we thank you. For the past three months, we have been making progressive changes, we were able to utilize our cancellation surveys and phone conversations to drill down and determine the driving factors were ‘system is too difficult’ and ‘missing features’.”
But, before you can continue, they cut you off again! “Impossible, we built everything that was asked of us!”
Don’t take it personally, human beings take credit for positive results and pass the blame for negative results.
You respond: “Armed with this information, we drilled down a bit. We looked at the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) during the first 90 days and to whom these questions were asked. We easily discovered that the reason for this increase in churn is 100%, a training issue!”
They are understandably skeptical, so you lay it out for them like this:
Over the last 3 months, we came up with a game plan and implemented it. First the criteria:
- We have to find subtle ways to train the customers, even without them knowing they’re being trained to address that the “system is too difficult”
- We have to train our own employees and get them to think outside their job title and address “whom the questions were being asked of”
- We have to train both our customers and our employees to address “missing features” because we all know devs and our product rock!
Here are the 6 tactics and trainings used to address this:
- Retrain on Demos. Our product demos suck because they’re focused on our product!
- Create a “welcome” video that doubles as a training video integrated into sign up or login process
- Include the top FAQs and the answers in the sign-up or login process. Customers shouldn’t feel like it’s training!
- Don’t overwhelm the customer during onboarding. Break up training into smaller segments if it seems your customer isn’t present in the moment or there’s too much information.
- If you share a screen with your customer during onboarding, create a leave-behind document on their desktop (with their permission!) that addresses another one or two FAQs and the answers.
- Train everyone to think about Customer Success. This will change the employees’ perspective. When a customer currently asks our Technical Support rep “how to turn on a feature” we reply with simple how-to instructions. We are now training them to think about what result the customer is looking for and ask themselves:
- By performing this action, will it cause a negative reaction in the system or process elsewhere?
- Are there other ways to achieve the same or get better results?
- Train everyone to ask “why”. Uncovering the reason why will often result in a better understanding of what the customer is trying to accomplish and result in creative fixes.
Be your company’s Neo, and let your Customer Success metrics be your matrix.