Your Customers Success is Your Own Success

In today video post, Tracey Kaufman, VP of Customer Experience for Cloud9, speaks about how a business should aspire to its customer’s success in order to become successful itself.

I agree with that saying. Furthermore, I think that if a business is constantly supplying an added value to its customers and focusing on the quality of its service rather than on sales (read: How NOT to Sell in SaaS and Increase Paid Conversions), that would lead to a win-win situation as both the users will get added value and the business will gain loyal customers.

Tracey is also talking about how to count active paying customers, referring to Jeanne Bliss book: “Chief Customer Officer“. How do you measure how many customers you have? Do you count your customer accounts? buy do you include canceled account in this amount? and did you count how many of them have actually succeeded and how many are going to renew?

In this blog I mention the importance of the measurement of the key metrics that any successful SaaS business should have. There are measurements that sometimes look simple but takes several metrics to calculate. Also should also keep in mind, that measuring is just the first step – the second step, which is just as important, is to interpret these numbers into customer behavior and make the right decisions by them.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

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Video Transcription:
Hi, my name is Tracey Kaufman, I’m the a VP of Customer Experience for Cloud9. In a lot of times, I think people look at, when they look at their customers, they say, “OK, well how do we know we’re done and if you have a product you know are they using that product? Have you deployed that product? Have you gotten them implemented?” But really you have to ask yourself–the question is, “What is the greater vision for that product?” Are you telling this customer that they’re gonna grow their business or they’re gonna gain more revenues or they’re gonna gain more forecast accuracy like we talk about.

And so I really believe at the beginning of an engagement with a customer, you have to dream. You have to figure out, what is it that they really want so it isn’t just the tactical, and then gauge success and come up like with a little success curve so you have key metrics along the way and you can have, you know, individual wins along the way but at the end of the day you’re really reaching high up, and that’s when you’re successful, when they’re increasing revenues, when they’re growing their company because of using your application.

Jeanne Bliss wrote a book called, “Chief Customer Officer”. And it’s really the Bible that I use for if you’re trying to do a customer success. disorganization. You really should read that book. It’s asking yourself the very basic questions of, how do you count your customers.

So many companies You ask them how many customers they have. And they look at their active paying customers and that’s their customer account. But you also have to know other questions like how many customer did you have now many of them actually cancelled? And how many of them are successful? And how many of them are going to renew?

So you have to be a lot more granular and segment your customer base and understand what your patterns are. If you had a hundred customers and now you have fifty customers, well that’s a problem. Because now you have a fifty percent turn rate. So it’s really being much more honest with yourself.