CS Impact

Lexi Santiago

While many customer success teams track metrics such as churn rate and customer satisfaction, measuring the impact of customer success on the overall business is important to me. How can I tie my CS efforts to revenue and growth metrics, and demonstrate the ROI of customer success initiatives? I am looking for a more sophisticated measurement tool and a deeper understanding of the business landscape.

ashley_martin

Hi @Lexi Santiago - Is CS responsible for renewals or expansions? I am not sure what CRM you use, but in the companies I have been in we have used sales force to track expansions as it was tied to sales and cs. If you can attach your name to accounts and opportunities you should be able to run a report that would show your upsell or expansion value. Renewals can also be tracked via CRM tool and you should be able to pull a report on what your renewal rates are.

Kevin Reinhardt

Hi @Lexi Santiago ,

So here's some things you might want to consider.

1. Renewals - impact of CSMs here is that they can gauge the health of the customer and this can be related to the likelihood and value at which renewals close. So you may want to consider the following;

- Customer Health - is this a red, yellow, and green at the account level or do you split it into categories?

• Add Customer Health to the renewal forecasts - this gives the team an extra dimension to the plans around closing a renewal, if the health is all green then the close plan is just commercial, etc...
• Renewal forecasting - have a quarterly meeting to et AEs/CSMs together and run through future quarter renewals to ensure that given the health the categories and values of the renewals are correct and churn is being forecasted accurately

Upsells - It has to start with a joint account plan with AE/ CSMs to identify whitespace. Also include your Success plan value realisation progress and whether there are any add ons which accelerate the value realisation (because there will always be budget for this). Again I would add health to Upsell opportunity forecasting to give the close plans an added dimension.

I would also measure things like close rates and forecast accuracy before you implement this and after to see the difference made by CS. Also keep a track of CSM sourced upsell opportunities (CSQLs).

Hope this helps, happy to discuss further.

jaime chambron

Yes to CSQLs.  Also track your team's activity and touches with client decision makers re customer engagement. For example have you built new relationships/opened doors to new departments or parts of the world? You can leverage engagement in health scoring - usually there are a few diff KPIs used to determine your health index.