My personal experiences, professional learnings, information of interest, and doctrines, whether they be achievements, reflections, or some quantum of solace.
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Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome. If I win, I will be happy, if I don’t, I won’t. It’s an if/then, cause and effect, quid pro quo standard that we cannot sustain because we immediately raise it every time we attain it. Happiness demands a certain outcome. It is result reliant. I say that if happiness is what you’re after, then you’re going to be let down frequently and you’re going to be unhappy much of your time. Joy, though — joy’s a different thing. It’s something else. Joy is not a choice. It’s not a response to some result. It’s a constant. Joy is the feeling that we have when we are doing what we are fashioned to do, no matter the outcome.
M. McConaughey
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Choose to be happy and aim for impact. There is really no time worth anything else.
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Measuring Customer Success
The biggest challenge for any SaaS organization is developing common metrics for understanding how customers use the product, what is driving attrition over time, and how customers perceive value and realize impact.
Customer feedback plays a central role in improving the product by using data to drive common understating across the company of;
Usage — Understanding what this data shows regarding feature-use and frequency clusters, enables us to make better decisions about where to invest in features.
Retention - For new customers; it’s about product fit, usability feedback, indications of continued use in the future, and motivations behind purchase/usage decisions. For existing customers, it’s about satisfaction, power-user feedback and pain points.
Perceived Value - A clear view of what the customer getting out of the product and how important it is to them delivering much more insight into their feedback.
Invested value — The amount of money customers spend on our products gives visibility into the relationship they have with the product.
As with all metrics, it’s important to view metrics in context and how they are trending over time. Another way to think about metrics is they are a way to raise questions, dive into the data to understand these questions, and keep asking better questions till you achieve better outcomes.
That said, here are high level metrics to measure the success of a company’s customer success strategies and team execution. They represent a baseline and should be augmented with those metrics that are specific to your product, user profiles, and company.
Recurring Revenue Performance
When most executives think about customer success metrics, they typically refer to the core SaaS financial metrics. Current customers represent the recurring revenue stream for a SaaS business and drives th company.
The following top five customer success financial metrics provide a top-level view of the overall financial health of an organization and can serve as a strong indicator when it comes to the long term growth and scalability.
Revenue Retention Rate (Gross & Net)
Revenue Churn Rate (Gross & Net)
Customer Retention Rate/Customer Churn Rate
Renewal Rate (Gross & Net)
Quick Ratio
Customer Health
Customer health metrics help SaaS companies identify customers and users that are getting value from the service/product and that are highly likely to renew or churn.
Customer health metrics include more than product usage metrics. There are many facets that should be considered to understand the holistic health of a customer, including the first-hand perspective of the teams that interact with customers directly (i.e. the customer success manager (CSM), customer support engineers, etc.)
A purely data driven approach may give you incomplete or outright bad signals. Taking a holistic approach at all touch points of the customer experience—not just those directly tied to product or usage— will give better signal on the health of current customers and help you take actions that improve customer health and increase retention.
Here are the top five customer success health metrics.
Product Usage
Daily Active Users (DAU)
Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Product Adoption
Customer Engagement
Customer Pulse (qualitative survey data) from Customer Success and Support teams
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Usage & Adoption
The way in which customers use the product can paint an important picture of customer success that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s common for SaaS companies to pay attention to obvious metrics like logins, but some products are crucial to the internal process and unique logins don’t give true indicator of customer health. Customer usage metrics can help inform and improve many areas of the business outside of just customer success. Take for example key feature usage: understanding what customers are using most frequently and what they aren’t using can inform the product team. In addition, trend of time spent using specific features can help inform the customer service team and help them proactively answer frequently asked questions or help them build out the knowledge base articles to help customers succeed and drive impact.
As helpful as usage metrics are to assess customer health, they should be used with caution because they could be vanity metrics that are hiding the true health of the customer. For example, a marketer could use her marketing automation solution every day even if she is unhappy with the solution and looking for an alternative, but she has to keep her marketing efforts going. If the marketing automation vendor relies too much on usage to assess health, they may be surprised when the usage cliffs on the day the marketing manager moves to a new solution. Leverage the following usage metrics strategically and carefully and they will be valuable insights into your broader view of customer health.
Here are the top five customer success usage metrics. I will be diving into definitions and formulas of financial metrics in upcoming blog posts.
Product Adoption (See more below on this)
Feature Utilization (contrasted against feature incident & request trends)
License Utilization Rate
Time Spent in Product
Impact/Outcomes Achieved (Customer & Organizational ROI)
Product adoption (aka “stickiness”) involves identifying the features that provide the most tangible impact (“impact features”) for your customers, deliver the outcomes they desire, and then measuring the adoption of those features over time.
Customer Success Performance
A customer success team is only as effective as the sum of its parts. Customer success leaders must have clear visibility on how each customer success manager (CSM) is doing in terms of financial metrics—like whether or not they’re achieving renewal quota and retaining customers (the most visible metrics to the organization). Equally important is to have a data-driven understanding of customer engagement activities, onboarding time, and customer advocacy activities.
Let’s take a look at the top customer success team performance metrics to consider (by team and by CSM).
Quarterly Gross Renewal Rate
Quarterly Expansion Revenue
Average Time to First Value
Revenue Retention Rate (Net)
Averages Days to Onboard
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Success & Support: Understanding the Customer experience
I’ve been asked to define the difference is between customer success and customer support. Whether customer success or customer support, both require the ability to us data (qualitative and quantitative) to deeply empathize with and listen to your customers across all segments.
Here’s a simple way to compare and contrast the two in the context of the customer.
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When the intent of what you do is selfish...you will loose. Always deploy kindness with intellectual honesty and intent.
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“Focus on action above ones ego. Is it important enough or is it something that is not focused on your goal.”
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Listen, Summarize, Clarify, & Understand.
True, sustained listening is one of the hardest skills to achieve. I’ve had the privilege of knowing a handful of people with the ability - and constantly strive to nurture this ability in myself.
A simple way to focus your attention is to listen with the intention of summarizing the other person’s point of view.
This stops you from burning mental calories to work out your reply (which in and of itself means you’re not listening), and helps you internalize the other’s words and meaning while identify any gaps in your understanding so you can ask questions to clarify.
The nature of these clarifying questions in themselves will show the other person that they have been heard and effort is being made to understand.
Summarizing and asking clarifying questions is a way of feeding back your understanding. Cutting short the conversation, stating opinions, value judgements, your own solutions, or even a lazy “I see” or “ok, but...” does not.
Be open.
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In a gentle way, you can shake the world. Create moments where you are influencing the future, and shape destinies through your presence. Lead.
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Capable Leadership
Leaders need the ability to set quality goals, check in regularly, give feedback often in a helpful manner, inspire continuous stretching and learning as well as nurture and motivate the best in their people.
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Shatter the walls holding you back...
I recently had the privilege of attending an event and meeting several entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.
It wasn’t until recently, that I came to the realization that the choices I’ve made throughout my career were driven by an entrepreneurial spirit.
Be Inspired. Be passionate. Break glass in your life & career.
This video underscores that personal realization...on a number of levels.
youtube
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Sometimes it takes a big fall to really know where you stand.
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Bad Code vs Tech Debt...
I recently was in a conversation where an engineer asserted that you can ‘write bad code and compensate for it by adding more servers’. When I probed on that line of thinking, the engineer asserted that to move fast you will incur tech debt. I came away from this conversation curious on why one would think ‘bad code’ is in fact tech debt which then lead me to think through how tech debt finds its way into software and systems.
Not all technical debt is bad, and strategically managing it well can yield benefits. To approach the strategic application of tech debt, classifying debt into categories helps with communicating and addressing tech debt issues in and across teams. Here are three forms of tech debt that can find their way into software and by thinking about tech debt in a structured manner you can better manage risk, costs, and the customer experience.
Deliberate Tech Debt
Often, engineers will know there’s the right way to do something, and the quick way to do something. Sometimes the quick way is the right way (to avoid over-engineering), but at times the team will intentionally build a quick solution to reduce time to market.
When taking this route, consider not only how much time you’ll save on launching a feature, but also the impact on not building the optimal solution to mitigate performance and/or limiting the ability to scale. Strategic product decisions that create deliberate tech debt need to be a structured decision with the risks and issues clearly defined and assessed.
Accidental/outdated Design Tech Debt
When designing software systems, applying an engineering mindset to understanding a problem is critical to avoid this type of tech Debt. Often, engineering teams try to balance thinking ahead and future-proofing their designs with simplicity and velocity of delivery. This is a tricky balance and nobody gets it right every time.
As systems evolve and requirements change, you might come to the realize that your design is flawed, or that new functionality has become difficult and slow to implement. It can’t be stressed enough how SWEs who consistently apply an engineering mindset to solving problems and share as much information and context crossfunctionally will mitigate this type of tech debt impacting product quality and user experience.
Bit Rot Tech Debt
Bit rot tech debt happens over time and more often than not is an indicator the engineering team needs attention. A component or system slowly devolves into unnecessary complexity through lots of incremental changes (see ‘hacks’), often exacerbated when worked upon by several people who might not fully understand the original design. Symptoms are, among others, copy-paste and cargo-cult programming.
This is the only type of tech debt that high performance engineering teams will self regulate & deprecate from their code. Strong teams will take the time to understand the design of the system they are working on, incrementally improve the design and clean up bad code along the way. Engineering teams should hold each other accountable for avoiding bit rot tech debt through structured code reviews and a disciplined application of the engineering mindset.
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Benefits of waiting...
I’ve had the privilege of working with some truly great leaders. I’ve learned (and continue to learn) so much simply by being present and keenly observing them in moments of failure, triumph and challenge.
I believe that being a good leader is when you strive to surround yourself and work with people who are smarter than you.
I believe a great leader understands that they need to be last.
The ability for a leader to hold their opinions to themselves allows them to hear everyone’s ideas, thoughts, and perspective. This allows their team to feel that they have all been allowed to contribute, have their ideas heard, and ultimately allows them to learn from everyone else before providing input and direction.
This seems like a simple concept but in reality, it’s really hard to master, internalize, and practice in the workplace.
So when it comes to meetings and group conversations at work, practice gaining the benefit of everyone else’s perspectives & ideas by being last.
Ethos. Pathos. Logos.
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Using algebraic topology to map the human brain
As we build compute infrastructure capable of powering higher order AI profiles, I think our ability to model the human brain will allow us to evolve AI’s role in driving the customer experience.
youtube
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Superposition, entanglement & the user experience...
We are seeing the very beginnings of how artificial intelligence can be applied to redefine the user experience.
The first applications of this are emerging in the customer support & service delivery spaces.
Though AI is assisting in enhancing the customer support experience today, we will need to make some significant step function advances in the underlying technologies to truely redefine the customer experience.
Case in point; quantum computing...
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Be a fearless & mission focused leader
I choose to constantly chase being a leader that leaves more leaders in their wake. It comes from the privilege of working with some insanely smart people in my career. You learn that you have to send the elevator back down.
What I’ve observed is all the great leaders I’ve had the privilege of working with share a fundamental set of attributes;
They believe in the unbelievable.
They still lean in and do the heavy lifting at work.
They run toward chaos.
They are transparent to a fault - wearing their emotions on their sleeve.
They protect the people they work with despite any blowback.
They lead through inspiration, not authority.
They take real risk (and don’t play in the margins)
They embrace the larger good.
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Don't look toward the future, because it's already here, knocking on your door. The key is to open the door.
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