KPIs are the ultimate indicator of where you want your team to spend their time. The old adage that people do what they're get paid to do holds true. If you're paying people to do QBRs, they'll do them. If you're not, it will be harder for them to do so. So as you're developing your KPIs, think about where you want your team to spend their time. If that's where they're spending their time today, great. Write some KPIs that will add motivation to their already busy days. If, however, they're spending times on areas where you don't want them to focus, use the KPI rollout to pivot their time and attention to an area that will be a better use of their time.

There are many facets of CS that may differ based on the size of the organization. With differences in organizational size, come differences in priorities, growth strategies, cost measures and balance for scale, as well as customer journey architectures/needs. A few specific areas to note: * At least initially, the size of the CS org is likely to grow based on the expanding customer pool. In the early days of an organization, more customers may equal more customers success managers until a balance of scale is introduced. * The skillsets of CSMs may evolve. Small companies may start with CSMs who are versatile in nature - technical, yet consultative, able to work well and closely with engineering and product teams, leadership capability for player/coach models. This agility allows an organization to flex to determine the ideal longer-term skillset of the customer success persona based on the needs of the customer. * Organization priorities are likely to shift, impacting how customer success teams are measured. In small companies, building brand and retaining customers at all costs may be key; therefore, customer success deliverables may be more extensive with less of a focus on ability to scale. CS teams may be measured on retention/churn. As companies grow in size, the need to balance cost and ability to scale likely becomes more prominent, so there's a need to assess scalability of what a CSM delivers. CSM orgs may be measured based on cost to serve or other margin-related factors. * In larger organizations, there may be more teams contributing to the customer journey - including services organizations that may have point-in-time deliverables (either for fee or included in price of contract). Examples may include onboarding or implementation specialists, technical consultants, insights analysts, etc. It becomes more important to align on a holistic customer journey when there are multiple points of interaction.

It depends on the level, but the main ones for us are retention (making renewal a non-event), increased customer usage and adoption/engagement, connection to the company values, strong, multi-threaded relationships with customers, and upsells/account expansion which increases product stickiness.

I think the most frustrating thing about Customer Success is that without agreement across the organization about the importance and role of Customer Success, it can become a catch-all. As the quarterback of the customer relationship, that means all things can fall to the CSM. If there are not very clear swim lanes, paths of escalation and role definition, this means the CSM may soon find themselves as; * Customer Support * Collections Specialist * Renewal/Contract Manager * IB seller * Product Specialist * Escalations Manager While a great CSM possesses skills that can help in each of those categories, they cant be all of those things without burning out quickly.

As per me, a startup should hire its first Customer Success Manager when it secures recurring revenue and has at least a few paying or subscribed customers. This is typically around Series A or earlier if customer retention and onboarding are key to growth. The goal is to drive adoption, reduce churn, and turn early customers into advocates. And also to promote as much as possible of their product in the external market. I'd also have a flavor of having playbooks in place to ease up the war coming ahead.

I want to first understand which activities or metrics correlate to churn, renewal and expansion. Then I know how to target my CS team and which activities to track off the back of that, as well as which metrics I need to keep a close eye on. So I don't think there's an easy one size fits all answer here. But I certainly think that broad strokes I will be tracking Health/adoption,GRR and NRR wherever I am, as well as understanding where you're losing WHY and WHO you're losing - is it specific company types, sizes, tenure etc.

In this scenario, I aim to pinpoint areas where the most significant impact can be made. If one product exhibits notably lower retention rates, focusing efforts there may be prudent. Alternatively, if a product contributes substantially to revenue, it warrants priority attention. Specializing team members to focus solely on one product can also streamline their efforts and enhance expertise.

I am a little biased here as the company I work for (Gainsight) is a customer success solution. In the product keynote here, we explain how we are integrating AI into our tool in order to solve for six large issues in your customer lifecycle. 1. Eliminate Blindspots 2. Remove Grunt Work to Make Room for What Matters 3. Turn Every Teammate into the Best Version of Themselves 4. Make Self-Service Not Suck 5. Transform Novices into Gurus 6. Help Customers Find Their Work Bestie The first three steps in the AI Playbook are all about how your team can leverage AI to improve the entire customer journey by giving your team back time to focus on what matters. The AI playbook focuses on making it easy for customers to access the information they need to be successful and share that knowledge with others in the community. In other words, Make Self-Serve Not Suck. In the past, trainings were all about watching a video and then answering a few questions. The experience wasn’t tailored to anyone’s specific needs or use cases. AI changes all of that. With AI, customers can get a completely custom onboarding and training experience without requiring extra hours from CS teams. Customers can access trainings that are all relevant to their job and goals. The result is more engaged learning, faster understanding, and companies that quickly Transform Novices into Gurus. And the power of Human-First AI doesn’t stop at self-serve. Successful companies also use it to Help Customers Find their Work Bestie. They connect customers with similar experiences so they can build a community together. Sharing information, updating best practices, working through use cases together only makes community better and customer loyalty stronger. Everyone wins when you put humans first! 

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. 

Scenario-based questions are my favorite but I especially like this one as it breaks the ice and allows the candidate to show their personality & you can have fun with the scenarios. Three emails hit your inbox, which do you answer first, second, and last and why? No wrong answers here! 1. You ordered lunch and the delivery person is running an hour behind and asks if you still want your order. (symbolizes a higher-value downgrade scenario) 2. Your friend wants to reschedule your plans for the evening and is asking for a confirmation (symbolizes a mid-value cancellation scenario) 3. You were given an Amazon gift card that needs to be claimed (symbolizes a lower-value upgrade scenario)