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.

The importance of KPIs might vary from organization to organization and between the respective goals or objectives. It makes more sense to have continued or enhanced metrics than just focusing on the initial level of evaluating a particular KPI. Usage / Number of Logins - It helps us delve into product adoption. However, it does not entirely reveal the depth and breadth of adoption. It definitely doesn't correlate with the business outcome. My suggestion is to depend on multiple measures, but the whole and sole represent adoption. CSAT - Some organizations consider CSAT a critical metric, but in my opinion, CSAT helps us explore a particular resolution or service and doesn't add to the long-term value quadrant. How about measuring the impact and working through mitigation risks for the longer-term value and loyalty? CES - Customer Effort Score helps us evaluate the effort minimized and is dedicated to that ONLY. How about you include a blend of experience/advocacy related to it? Combine NPS and CES for a broader context. Ultimately, always define meaningful metrics or KPIs that align with the organization's goals, keeping in mind the long-term value, and sustain them.

This is one of the most critical components of customer success leadership both when establishing a CS function or joining a team with an already established CS org. If a CS team sits within the sales organization, there may be a natural alignment already anchoring the full team to joint business-based KPIs like churn reduction or retention/renewal outcomes. In this case, it's important to recognize how each team contributes to those shared outcomes - while the KPIs may be shared, the path to achieving the KPIs can (and likely should) differ by team. For example, CS may lean more into product adoption and customer value assurance in service to retention or renewal outcomes, whereas sales is responsible for growing the customer base or growing the renewal. If the sales and CS teams are managed separately within the organizational structure, it becomes even more key to have conversations around how CS incentivization and measurement models serve the broader organizational and business outcome goals. For example, showcasing how boosting customer product adoption through well-timed customer engagements leads to customer value and stronger renewal outcomes. One of the most effective ways to anchor teams on commonly shared KPIs is to be very specific about how the actions (inputs) lead to results (outcomes) - ensuring this narrative is reinforced consistently through the organization. It's also important to be transparent on each team (sales/CS) around how team members are measured if there are differences in accountability structures - this builds trust and confidence that while actions may differ, 'skin in the game' is present for all teams in service to business outcomes.

In my experience, in order to retain good Customer Success talent, here are things that you must offer: * Clear career growth opportunities * Invest in ongoing training and development * Foster a positive, inclusive team culture where achievements are recognized and employees feel valued * Encourage work-life balance by offering flexibility and supporting initiatives * Provide competitive compensation and benefits to ensure employees feel financially supported, which I feel we do a great job of at Zendesk.

This is going to depend heavily on your product. In our case, customers use our product to improve the way they work, so we have dozens or hundreds of users in a given account with high consistency role to role, and we have centralized administrator(s). That means we can talk to a few people to move the needle on the many. We do a few things: * Talk to someone! Start with the champion or the exec who purchased the product to understand if their needs are changing, if we should push on a different use case, or what makes the "good" users different from the "not so good" users. Refresh your success plan and move forward. * Roadmap as Bait: Many disengaged customers will show up for an exclusive peek at the roadmap. Offer a roadmap preview as a way to get the customer on the phone to check in on their priorities, and to get them excited for what's to come. If you don't have a customer-facing roadmap slide, insist on having one made. * Benchmark: Show your customers how they stack up against their peers. Our best customers are achieving X, you are way below... let's talk about how to get you there. You can do this at scale or in a conversation. * Engage users directly: You have to get the content right. Personalize according to roles and use cases that are likely important to them and push content directly through in-app, webinars/events, emails <- whatever works for your users. Always give them 2-3 easy things they can start doing in your app immediately and have big payoff. * The bold move: Send an adoption report to your exec buyer or champion. This highlights top users, what parts of the product they are/aren't using, and who is not using (Note: this is risky if you have a renewal coming up so experiment before going big.)

The ability to do this well totally depends on the size of your organisation but there's a couple of easy things that stand out: 1) Ask your product team to join specific calls and get feedback live from the customer 2) Set up a CAB (Customer Advisory Board) that invites your top and most forward-thinking customers to meet in a formal setting with your product team 3) Collect feedback in a repository that can easily tell the story of the feedback from your Enterprise customers

The two areas I would recommend are 1) Sharpening your Sales skills and 2) Adopting some Product Manager mindsets. When working with customers and the further upmarket you go, the more enriched these conversations need to be and the immediate areas for many customers are to understand their contracts, how they can scale with your product, value alignment, and ROI. Supplementing this, customers want to know how your product will be evolving and how their feedback can influence the roadmap. Being able to cut right to the value of a product, requirements, outcomes, and how those align with the customer's values will set your customer and Product teams up for mutual success!

The best metrics to use to justify a pay raise are those that tie to revenue and direct value impact (internally and customer-facing). I like to keep a private list (for example, Asana) of the projects I've worked on and my contributions to them so I can refer to it during performance reviews, promotion advocacy, etc. Revenue metrics - must be quatifiable: * Net Revenue Retention in my portfolio * Expansion revenue * Renewal win rate (this is a ratio or percentage, not a $ amount) * CSQLs provided to sales (Customer Success Qualified Leads) Value Impact: * Significant contributions of customer advocacy events, including customer speakers / event participation, referencability, creation of case studies * Creation of 1:many customer-facing value drivers, such as webinars, podcasts, training series, enablement materials

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!

I love this question! My top 4 thoughts: * Every sales team is different. Find out how they work – in Eightfold, we have Account Executives (they are front end pre-sales deal closers), Account Managers (focused on install base after implementation), Sales Development Reps (responsible for lead generation and first connects), and Solution Consultants (demonstrating our platform to potential clients). Find out what your sales folks do and how that impacts you. * Talk to more than 1 salesperson in each department – everyone is different and has unique ways of working. I was referred into Eightfold by someone in sales and had some great conversations with that person. However, that was just one person, and it was also a friend. Looking back, I should have reached out to more folks in different areas of the sales team to learn more. * From your conversations, compile a list of what potential clients are trying to solve for – those will be the same pain points you will hear about once they go live. Do your research – take that list and run it by your leadership, professional services, product, engineering, etc. and see if it all is consistent. Learn what you can about those issues and see what ideas you might have to address some of them. * Ask the sales team what they expect from CS. You may get very different answers, and most likely won’t be able to be everything to everyone. Listen, ask questions, talk to your leadership, and decide the best way for you to work with those on the sales team.