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.

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.

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.

I’ll share 2 questions – one is behavioral based, and one is situational. One of our core values is Extreme Ownership. I ask candidates to “Tell me about a time when you had to convince someone to do something in order for you to meet a goal or deadline. Why did you need to convince them? What was the goal/deadline? What was the result?” What I like about this question is it embodies all things CS - accountability; influence (usually without authority; partnership and teamwork; creativity… I look for an answer that helps me understand the what, the how, and most importantly, the why. Influencing someone because you missed something and now are in a crunch is very different than your new leader assigning you a nebulous project with a clear deadline, but not much direction. One of the best answers I’ve gotten was around a ‘still in development' product that was sold to a customer prior to the CSM taking the account. The customer was frustrated with the length of time it was taking to go GA - and with 2 missed delivery dates already. was asking for specifics to bring to their senior leadership regarding the 3rd promised delivery date. The candidate talked about the challenge first of understanding what the use case was as well as what was promised in the sales process. The candidate had to help the customer define the use case and then went back to the AE to understand what was sold. They then went to the product team to understand the product functionality and engineering to get timelines, which were still a ways out. They went back to the customer with the updated information and the customer was extremely unhappy. The candidate held a cross functional meeting internally - they were able to get alignment internally to prioritize the product to get within 2 weeks of the 3rd deadline, which was much improved from 6 weeks. The customer was cautiously optimistic, and when the vendor was able to deliver on the newly agreed upon timeline and the product worked as expected, over a period of weeks the customer moved from a detractor in sentiment to a promoter. The other question I’ll talk about here is “If you were to join us, what would you do in the first 90 days to build trust with your peers, leadership, and cross functional team members? (NOT CUSTOMERS) What I am looking for here first is whether their instinct is to lead by process or by people. Some candidates say they schedule meetings to understand the product, and some say they want to know what makes the team tick. I also listen to see if they tend to ask for help or go it alone. Neither are right or wrong; it helps me understand how they tend to work. I then look for them to share specifics on ways they would engage, and if it would be different for each group or more of a cookie cutter approach. This is really important for us as all of our CSMs are fully remote, and they need to be able to work with a variety of people at different levels in different ways.

I'm not directly facing that at the moment, but I do have some thoughts. Self-led onboarding is amazing if it's likely to succeed. Let's maximize your changes of that. Here are some things you can explore: * Is the person doing the onboarding highly motivated to get it done quickly? * If the buyer is delegating to someone else to implement, how can you set expectations for their effort and get the buyer to keep pressure on? * Consider aligning on the process and expectations in the sales process while you still have their attention. Provide the checklist/plan then and make sure the buyer sees it. * Provide progress reports to the buyer during the onboarding so they can keep pressure on and unblock issues * Bonus Points: Gamify the onboarding experience for the person doing it. Add little celebrations of confetti in your app, give them points toward something, give certificates or possibly even swag when they hit major milestones. * Does the customer have a high likelihood of success implementing themselves? If no, why not? * Product experience not intuitive enough: What in-app changes or guidance can be provided? Can you also provide short videos to help? * Customers have lots of questions: Can you educate them through online courses and/or a mix of live office hours or webinars. You can also have dedicated parts of your online community for this. * Can you offer a mix of self-led and moments where they really need a human to help? Give them a scheduling link for those human sessions to allow them to book at their own pace. * Consider using a customer portal to prescribe the steps they need to take, content they need to learn, and any important meetings they should book with you. * Consider formalizing self-led onboarding. If it works, put some resource behind making it more viable. You could also explore monetizing the higher-touch onboarding offerings.

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

Here’s a strategic approach to effectively use customer feedback to enhance product adoption: * Collecting Feedback Across Various Channels * In-app and email feedback tools: Use prompts and surveys within the application to gather real-time, context-specific feedback. Use emails for stakeholders who are not logging in regularly to engage and cover all your bases. At Gainsight, we use in-app NPS for end users and email NPS for our key decision makers. We also use CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys to identify friction points in adoption. * Customer support interactions: Analyze issues and suggestions that arise in support tickets. CSAT ratings are a good proxy of product satisfaction as well. * User interviews and focus groups: Conduct detailed discussions with users to dive deeper into their experiences and gather qualitative data. * Use your customer-facing teams: Your CS, Sales, Sales Engineering, Support and Services are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to product and the customer feedback on features. Sakes can tell you which features land well in a demo and help us create a market differentiator. CS can tell you which features are driving most value and which features have the highest friction. Support can tell you which features have the highest number of priority 1 support tickets (which, mind you, is not a bad thing because it also shows mission-critical features of your product). I have seen product teams not gathering enough data from customer-facing people who have a synthesized understanding of the product adoption across your future and current customer base. * Segmenting Feedback: Organize feedback by user type, feature, or phase in the customer journey. This helps in understanding which parts of your product or which user groups need attention. For example, if new users report difficulty understanding a core feature, that’s a signal to improve onboarding materials or the feature’s design. * Prioritizing Feedback: Not all feedback will be equally important. Prioritize based on: * Impact on user experience: Feedback that addresses widespread or critical issues should take precedence. * Strategic alignment: Focus on feedback that helps achieve business goals like increasing adoption or reducing churn. * Feasibility: Consider technical and resource constraints in prioritizing which feedback to act on. * Close the Feedback Loop: Communicate back to customers about the changes made based on their input. This not only validates that you value their feedback but also encourages further engagement and feedback. For instance, update release notes, blog posts, or direct emails can be used to inform users about how their suggestions have been implemented.

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!

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!

This question is a bit subjective as going "above and beyond" can mean different things to different people. If a candidate truly wants a role, in my opinion, they should do whatever they feel puts them in the best position to receive an offer. I cannot remember ever walking out of an interview and thinking to myself "that candidate was overprepared." With that said, there are a few areas, I would recommend a candidate focus on: 1. Know the company/product: I highly recommend learning everything you can on a company. Some examples include reviewing their product offering, reading case studies and watching a demo on their website. 2. Know the role you are interviewing for: You should know the job description inside and out. Understand the experience the company is looking for and the day-to-day responsibilities of the position. Practice speaking about your background and how it is a fit for this role. 3. Learn about your interviewer: It can never hurt to know more about or find something in common with the person interviewing you. For example, learn about their previous companies/positions, where they went to college or some of their interests. Most of this information can be found on Linkedin or on the company website. Find a way to work this into the interview as it can make for a much better conversation and shows the interviewer you have done your research. 4. Prepare questions for the interviewer ahead of time. If you are not good at coming up with questions on the spot, it is best to have 3-4 questions written down ahead of time. Asking questions shows the interviewer you are interested in the position and want to learn more. Any candidate truly interested in joining a new company should have plenty of questions to ask.