Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations.
That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base.
If you are a VP of Customer Success, it is time to go beyond defining strategy and start ensuring the execution of your strategy across the organization. It is time to use your customer and revenue data to enhance your customer success processes, and consider assigning the role of Customer Success Operations.
Learning From The Success of Sales Operations
In the 1970’s, Xerox established the sales operations function to help build an effective sales force and manage everything from technical processes to reporting metrics for the sales and executive team.
Similarly, Customer Success Operations define processes and metrics for the VP and CSMs. This role uses data and technology to support operations, diagnose issues, and design more effective programs and activities. They operationalize your VP’s strategy, define the right customer success KPIs, and make decisions that help the team achieve their goals.
With more visibility on the customer success function, it is clear that maturing customer success organizations are discovering the need for additional operational support to achieve their KPIs.
Quick Summary of Customer Success KPIs
Speaking of KPIs, let’s review some of the most important metrics to consider, organized by customer lifecycle stages:
Onboarding
- Time to first value
- Onboarding quality (product consumption after onboarding, CSAT survey, etc)
Adoption
- Daily Active Users (DAU), Weekly Active Users (WAU), License utilization, etc.
- Custom metrics that reflect specific product features
- Trends in overall product consumption
Renewal/Expansion
- Renewal % , Expansion %
- Net Growth
Escalation
- Number of escalations per month/year
- Resources and time spent
- Win rate
Customer success operations deliver value by providing the tactical support that will continuously improve these metrics.
The Impact of Customer Success Operations
A successful customer success operations analyst can help your VP of Customer Success drive the team to efficient goal attainment.
Improved Team Performance
With your customer base in constant flux, customer success ops can monitor how your team works and make recommendations that improve the priorities and workflow of the team.
Better Performance Visibility
By managing different versions of reporting and dashboards for each group, customer success ops can improve visibility into business outcomes, what needs improvement, and what needs more attention.
Scalable Team Processes
Customer Success Ops ensures that the tools, programs, and team are as efficient and effective as possible, and to address issues in a way that is beneficial to the business as a whole.
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Customer success is maturing. Executives need to invest in efficient, data-driven customer success if they want to truly make a revenue impact. Adding customer success operations is an important step to drive efficiency and increased revenue from the Customer Success team.
