What metrics/data points have you found to be the most successful in providing the C-suite adequate insight into the customer base and its health? What are the top 3 questions you get from the C-suite on the CS organization?

You can go two ways here with respect to metrics.

1. Use a metric they know and understand

   1. Pros: They can engage with it, they have an understanding of why it may be going up or down and a sense of how they can help influence it.

   2. Cons: It might not be the best measure of the health of the customer base or may be one of 5+ factors.

2. Use something new that you feel better represents the business.

   1. Pros: You can have confidence (if you've done your homework) that influencing this metric will drive retention and growth

   2. Cons: It can take several months of repetition to warm up the executives to what these numbers mean and how to influence them

Frankly, I do a little of both. We have aligned the executive team on a set of metrics on which we have varying degrees of comfort and confidence. Here are a few examples

• Adoption Health - defined by our data science team and shown to have a strong correlation to retention. A composite score that the executives have moderate comfort/understanding of but they're aware of the strong correlation.

• Executive Engagement - % of accounts and ARR where we've had an intentional exec conversation in the past 90 days.

• Onboarding Duration - # of days to take a customer from kickoff to launch.

• ARR not yet launched - how much of our ARR is not yet in the Launched phase (meaning they're still in onboarding).

Top questions from the exec team:

1. How is retention trending this quarter, next qtr, for this year?

2. Why do we have confidence that our renewal/retention forecast is accurate? [I demonstrate this through the other metrics]

3. Which customers need help from the exec team?