I've found two KPIs to be difficult to commit to: 1. Customer Health. If you have a robust algorithm to measure customer health (influenced by a number of inputs ), it can be hard commit to a certain outcome. To frame this another way, I've often observed customer health scores as being a bit of a black box where it's hard to tie the actions you take to specific outcomes when there could be a number of variables outside of your control that influence the ultimate score. I much prefer to commit to lead measures that are directly within the control of the team. KPIs related to customer engagement are a good example of things that are more directly within the team's control. 2. Upgrade rate. Many CSM teams are measured on Net Revenue Retention. As part of this, your CSMs may be responsible for identifying growth opportunities within the install base of customers. I find it's effective to measure the team on how many growth opportunities the team identifies but not the close rate or upgrade rate, especially if the Sales or Account Management team owns the closing motion. 

You have to look at what the business cares about and then work backwards to how Customer Success fits into those overall targets. For example, if the business has a retention problem, it's probably important to have a Gross Revenue Retention KPI. If, however, the business is more interested in price increases and cross-sell and upsell, then tie CSMs to Net Revenue Retention. At AlertMedia, there was a business-wide push to build out our Advocacy program so we incentivized CSMs to source advocates and add them to our pool. This dramatically increased the number of advocates we have to pull from going forward.

Technical Support response targets! We’ve all been there, and being the first Success Hire is super exciting. You get to wear many hats, get involved all the way through the customer lifecycle and be scrappy to get customers what they need. For us at the beginning, that meant taking on a lot of Technical Support tickets for our EMEA customers, especially in the morning before our then US-based tech support team was online. On the one hand, this gives you a lot of valuable product knowledge that can help you be an impactful CSM, but on the other hand, it can mask the business need to expand technical support teams and can hurt your focus in the long term. If you can, explain early the difference between CS and Tech support KPIs and ensure that anything you take on is temporary!

Rather than just asking a candidate about their background, I prefer to ask about real situational questions. Here are a few of my favorites: * Tell me about a time you had an unhappy customer. What was the issue and how did you resolve it? * Take me through a time when a customer provided a churn notice and you were able to save them. What was your process and how did you turn things around? * Walk me through one of your recent renewals. When did you start the renewal conversation and what did the entire process look like? Also, in my opinion, all candidates need to do some type of live presentation for the hiring manager/team before an offer is sent out. Keep in mind, presenting to customers is a major part of a CSM's job and is not a skill I recommend you judge based on an interview and/or resume. While a candidate can tell you all about their communication style and experience, I believe the only way to truly judge their presentation skills is to see it live. 

Been there, done that! IMO, it’s pretty simple – start with who is screaming the loudest and why. Take what they are frustrated about, ask them to prioritize their needs, and then see about knocking them off, one at a time. You can’t fix everything overnight, but get a win under your belt, and then another win, and so on. And then take those lessons from your loudest clients and see what you can apply for other clients. · Ask lots of questions of your internal teams to see if you can solve issues or to get answers · Do as much as you can before escalating · Be targeted about who you are escalating to and what you expect from them – is it a timeline for the client, a fix for their issue, a meeting with internal experts? · Make sure you are following up diligently with your clients! · And then, add meetings in with your non-screaming clients when you can – you don’t want them to feel neglected – don’t take them for granted – quiet isn’t always good 😊

Customer success KPIs for a self-serve product may differ from those for a more traditional, high-touch product. This is more of a 1:Many methodology driven based on these strategies. Here's how they typically change: 1. Customer Onboarding and Activation: With a self-serve product, the focus shifts to ensuring customers can quickly and easily onboard themselves and activate key features without human intervention. KPIs may include time to first value, activation rate, and completion of onboarding tasks. 2. User Engagement and Adoption: Tracking user engagement and adoption becomes critical in a self-serve model. KPIs may include metrics such as active users and feature adoption rates. 3. Customer Satisfaction and Support | NPS: While self-serve products aim to reduce the need for human support, it's still important to measure customer satisfaction and provide resources for self-help. KPIs may include customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), self-service resolution rates, and the effectiveness of knowledge base articles or tutorials. 4. Churn Prevention: Preventing churn becomes even more crucial with self-serve products, as customers can easily switch to competitors if they don't see value or encounter roadblocks. KPIs may include churn rate, customer retention rate, and reasons for cancellation. 5. Expansion Revenue: Driving expansion revenue from self-serve customers requires a focus on upselling and cross-selling opportunities within the product experience. KPIs may include upgrade rates. 6. Product Feedback and Iteration: With direct user interactions, self-serve products provide valuable feedback for product iteration and improvement. KPIs may include the quantity and quality of feedback collected, as well as the speed of implementing product enhancements. In a nutshell, KPIs for self-serve products will revolve mainly around the onboarding effectiveness, use of KB or bot, use of digital motions to capture feedback at the feature level, milestone level, and ease of use.

What a wonderful opportunity- to start a fresh org! I see the Customer Success org as playing a key linking role between departments in your company to bring continuity to the customer journey, and with customers to make their voices heard within your organization. The first few weeks are about learning: * What are the gaps your company is trying to address by adding a Customer Success function? * Ask your customers: What have been the moments of truth (make or break moments) in their journey with your company so far? Where have they struggled? What has gone well? * Ask your coworkers: What opportunities do they see to make improvements in customer experience and cross-org partnership? Then you can turn to planning: * What are the key objectives of the new Customer Success Organization? How will you structure the team to meet those? * What should the new Customer Journey look like and what role does each team play in it? * Socialize these plans with your business partners, executive team, and some customers to get feedback and make them better. Then it's about doing: * Start with a few processes and metrics you can impact within a quarter. Get some quick wins and build from there. * Ensure you have a feedback mechanism for customer input and that you check in frequently with your business partners.

First 30 Days: Understand the lay of the land 1. Understand the current state of Customer Success: Meet the Customer Success Team and know the team members. * Understand the existing process of engagement, interaction, onboarding deployed by the customer success team * Understand the data and metrics captured by the customer success team. What are the metrics that the CS team is compensated on and how are they doing against those? Understand the GRR, NRR, and Cost to serve for every segment. Make sure that you know what is the historical achievement of these metrics. * Identify challenges, gaps, and points of friction. * Understand which tools are being used for Customer Success, get a demonstration of the solution used from your CS ops team and assess the current state of its deployment. 2. Meet with key stakeholders: Schedule one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders in the company, including executives, sales teams, product teams, and support teams. Get to know them, their goals, and their expectations for customer success. * Sales: Dive into the sales process, and understand their methodology and market sentiment. Understand the pricing strategy of the products and services. Deep dive into the challenges faced by the sales team. Understand customer segmentation, financials, metrics, churn etc. How are they capturing customer goals during the time of sales and how do they work with the customer success team around renewals and expansion? * Product: Understand the product, its value proposition, future roadmap, client feedback etc. Understand the competitive landscape of the product and the firm, peers, product differentiation etc. Become a product expert. Get a comprehensive download on the use cases to grasp product capability. * Services: What are the services option presented to the customer and what is the service penetration for ongoing services? Is your product complex and requires specialized services to onboard and maintain? What are the support tiers (premium, standard, elite etc)? How does onboarding to CS? Is CS responsible for onboarding and if not, is CS involved at the time of the onboarding? 3. Connect with the customers: Engage with a cross-section of customers across all segments. * Make sure that you are not only speaking with your best customers but also customers who are struggling and have the potential to churn. * Understand your customer's points of view, product feedback, challenges, expectations, engagement experience, etc. * Understand what ROI/Value means for your customers After completing all these interactions and conversations, it's crucial to reflect on them, take notes, and prepare for the next steps. Next 30 Days: Assess and strategize Over the next 30 days, the focus should be on gathering and analyzing data to gain a perspective on the business. 1. Getting deeper into Customer Success: * For Immediate Action Items: The Customer Success Leader should take immediate action on the areas that the management has highlighted as critical. This may involve handling at-risk customers, preventing churn, or engaging with key customers. In a rapidly growing company, it's common to encounter situations where one must learn how to build a plane while flying it. * Analyze customer success data and metrics to identify gaps and key focus areas such as churn reduction, engagement improvement, supplementing growth, improving customer experience etc. Some of the critical metrics one should be familiar with at an org level are: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Life-Time-Value (LTV), Average Recurring Revenue, Net Renewal Rates, Gross Renewal Rates, Annual Churn, Adoption and Engagement Scores. * Take a fresh look at the current customer segments, including their metrics, health scores, etc., to develop and implement segment-based interventions. Map out the customer experience journey, identify key touchpoints, and compare it with the existing framework to identify areas for improvement. * Begin creating process documents to standardize Customer Segmentation, Onboarding, Education, Customer Engagement, Adoption, Usage, and reporting. Develop churn, renewal, and growth plans to solidify the position of the Customer Success function. * Evaluate the team's current capabilities and compare them with the required capability to meet present and future goals, identify gaps, and start addressing them through hiring, training, or coaching. * Customer Succes Software: If the solution is not solving for your needs, make sure you are establishing a clear path of execution with the CS ops team. 2. Establish a working cadence with your Stakeholders: * Sales: Set up regular weekly meetings with Sales leaders and representatives to cover topics such as account health, churn and revenue forecasting, engagement plans, customer health scores, and NPS. Start having conversations on pricing decision-making processes. * Product: Collaborate closely with the product team and familiarize yourself with their product roadmap. Given the close relationship between Product and Customer Success and the many shared metrics between the two teams, it's crucial to integrate various types of reports and feedback, such as dashboards, usage reports, adoption reports, feature reports, churn reports, and NPS scores, in order to align with each other. Both teams must gather the voice of the customer, and it's essential to establish a process document that outlines conversations on alignment and report sharing to ensure that efforts are predictable and consistent. * Services: Work with services to define a process of Dsmooth handoff between services and Customer Success. Establish ROE and RACI if it is missing. 3. Establish rapport with your Customers: During this period, it's important to start proactively engaging with customers through activities such as Business Reviews, Usage Reviews, Escalation Calls, Churn Conversations, Expansion conversations, and more. The Customer Success Leader should take the lead in initiating periodic conversations or sense-checks with key client decision-makers. At the end of 60 days, one should have secured some quick wins, established rapport with the functions, grown influence with some key stakeholders and established rapport with key clients Final 30 Days: Refinement and Execution A Formal rollout of the Customer Success strategy : * It is necessary to formally implement a Customer Success Strategy that aligns with the metrics and plan. * Additionally, there should be a formal launch of the Customer Experience Journey Map that includes a comprehensive plot of interaction points for various functions with their defined purposes. * The Customer Segmentation Framework should be incorporated with clear and defined parameters. The Engagement Framework should be built around customer segments and personas, with defined objectives, metrics, timelines, and ownership. Key activities, such as onboarding, education, engagement, and reviews, should be standardized, and their effectiveness should be tracked through metrics. * Plans to drive scaled programs should start taking shape. The Customer Success Leader should introduce periodic dashboards with metrics at all three levels - Organizational, Functional, and Individual - and lead discussions with all relevant stakeholders. * Prioritizing decisions regarding efficiencies and effectiveness is crucial, and the adoption of a Customer Success Platform or an Integrated SaaS platform should be considered. Work on established goals with your Stakeholders: * Sales: The Customer Success team should play an active role in all post-sales interventions, including discovery, developing engagement plans, onboarding, education, health reporting, and business reviews. The team should also provide feedback to the sales department to help improve sales processes. Meetings should be scheduled periodically, and expansion plans, such as upsells, cross-sells, and referrals, should be collaborative efforts. There should be increased collaboration and cohesion between the Customer Success and Sales teams. The Customer Success Leader and Sales Leader should hold regular meetings, while representatives from both teams should work together to drive business outcomes. * Product: It is essential for the product team and the Customer Success Team to establish a regular schedule for meetings, either every two weeks or once a month. These meetings should focus on understanding Customer Sentiments, Feedback, Engagement, Adoption, Churn, and Feature usage. The meetings should have clear outcomes and next steps. Clients * Engagement should be based on a documented plan that has been approved by decision-makers. This document should include the following components: the objectives of the clients, goals or milestones to measure success, metrics, key intervention plans with timelines to achieve the goals, and sign-off from the necessary parties. Implementing such a plan will make the customer journey more predictable. 

No technical skills are not always necessary to be an effective CSM, however having a basic understanding of technical concepts can he helpful particularly if working in certain subsegments of the tech industry. The level technical skill required is also to a degree dependent on the company and the scope of the role. Some CS roles in deeply technical companies may require you to have a level of familiarity with technical concepts however for many CS roles this is not the case. However in either scenario familiarity with the product or service being supported can be beneficial as as a CSM while you may not be responsible for technical troubleshooting you will be required to have a good understanding of the product offering and will need to be capable having conversations with customers about the products features, functions and capabilities.

There are many signals of potential churn; at scale, that's the inherent problem with data points; there are so many. Nothing replaces speaking to your customers regularly and digging into what's happening in their environment. Yet as a guide, you could look at the signals/question below, put a score against each and create a simple weighted risk or engagement score against each customer to identify where you need to focus, i.e. healthy vs at risk. There are CS tools out there to optimise this, but it can be done in-house manually without investing in a tool if you want to quickly get something off the ground. * Has there been a successful onboarding? * Has a ticket been submitted in the last x amount of days? * Is the customer expanding? * Are they using specific features? * Has there been a portal login during the last month? * Was there QBR or value-driven engagement held in the previous three months? * Is there an upcoming meeting scheduled with the customer? * Has the champion changed in the last six months? * Has the customer confirmed (verbally or in writing) that they are receiving value from their investment?