Who are decision makers & influencers in choosing a NPS, CSAT or a CS tool in your organization?

Hello Experts, A quick question: Just trying to understand the customer success role a little better.

Who in your organization was the decision maker of choosing a Customer success, NPS or a CSAT tool ?

Was it the Product Owner, a CSM, Insight Manager?

and who is the actual person responsible for actually using/implementing these tools and proviring insights to respective teams?

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Tanuj Diwan

Thanks @Mahesh Motiramani You have answered pretty much everything in a comment

Mahesh Motiramani

@Tanuj Diwan - We had a group of CS leaders (Dir/Sr. Dir) lead the selection of the CS platform (which we use for CSAT as well), in consultation with our IT team who had to make sure that it integrates with our Salesforce CRM very well. The implementation was led by CS Ops and they continue to be the owner of the platform and activities surrounding it.

Tanuj Diwan

@Steve Bernstein I just got time to read the first article and i also jumped to chapter 1 and idea about selecting the right people for the survey is surely one thing I have taken a note of. I will go through the other articles and update you on my queries. Thanks a lot for this

Steve Bernstein

Thanks for asking, @Tanuj Diwan . Here's a few resources (small, medium, large!) for driving up customer participation ("response rates") and I would appreciate your thoughts/concerns on these, especially if you have a specific use case in mind that I can address... the first 2 are focused on high-touch processes but include templates that can scale while retaining as much human interaction as resources permit...

1. Blog ("small"): https://waypointgroup.org/nps-cheating-part-2/

2. White paper ("medium"): https://waypointgroup.org/whitepapers/silver-bullet-customer-health-scoring/

3. Book ("large"): https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Sucks-More-Your-Customers-ebook/dp/B00N9DCDAA/ref=sr_1_17?dchild=1&keywords=Failure+sucks+book&qid=1593758196&sr=8-17

Will Pagden

@Steve Bernstein , I am quickly falling in love with your responses. Such great information with so much I can take away. thank you so much.

Tanuj Diwan

Thanks @Steve Bernstein for sharing your learnings. We have just started the VOC program and I will surely add some tips from this conversation.

Things we are already doing is integration with Hubspot/Sync responses/Ticketing for close loop.

Could you share a bit more on how did you manage 60-80% response rates with very few non responders?

Tanuj Diwan

Absolutely, we have to make a person own this program. Thanks Manan

Manan Joshi

Yes the admin / implementer is a part of CS team. Remember he/she has a big role to play in platform adoption and change management.

Alex Tran

@Tanuj Diwan - Yes you can do NPS surveys through Gainsight. I actually work for Gainsight now

The main implementer was our CS Operations Manager. During the implementation, we collected feedback from CSMs on what's most important / what they would like.

Steve Bernstein

Some considerations when selecting a VoC platform... I’ve been doing this work for 20+ years (including at Satmetrix, the creators of NPS brought to market with Bain) and have learned a few things, so here are some key questions I’d recommend you check into… I don’t mean to boil the ocean but if you truly want to get business (financial) results and not just measure then you’ll want to consider these areas:

How will you analyze results? Yes, you want it integrated with Salesforce so the account teams an easily see account and contact sentiment, what’s working/needs-improvement, etc. But how will you look for patterns across accounts for key driver” analysis to address the true root-cause and allow CSMs to have a bit more work-life balance so they’re not constantly dealing with fires? Btw, we know that just because something scores low, it’s not necessarily the biggest-bang-for-buck, so some stats and slice-and-dice capabilities would be necessary for this. You'll also want "out of the box" analytics because you shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel by creating your own reporting with insight.
Non-responders are a key cohort for B2B feedback programs. Well-run feedback programs achieve a 60-80% response rate (depending on segment…truly, we see this all the time), even with “longer” questionnaires. How will you shine the light on non-responders and do what’s needed to drive up participation? In well-run programs, we find that silent accounts are ~14x more likely to churn than accounts that give you feedback, so gaining a predictor of churn through this customer-engagement process Remember, non-responders are telling you something – you may think you’ve adequately positioned the need for their feedback but those non-responders don’t find it worth their while – that’s an important datapoint. You’ll want strategies to effectively engage them and your provider should help you achieve these results.
How will you ensure you have good oversight into the follow-up process -- are your teammates really doing it and are they documenting the root-causes/“lessons learned” in such a way that you can drive organizational learning?
Do you want a simple survey that provides a metric, or are you trying to implement a Voice-of-Customer (VoC) program that drives a cycle of improvement that accelerates growth through reduced churn and accelerated expansion? Your note sounds more like VoC… VoC programs are far more than just a “survey” and would bring those high response rates (true customer engagement), cross-functional collaboration and reporting with “slice and dice” analytics that allows cross-functional participation, follow-up management with root-cause and oversight, financial linkage, etc.. You’ll want the organization focused on improvement… do you have a way to do that, or will the CS team be isolated and overwhelmed?
Do you have the expertise to construct the questionnaire(s), implement the communications program so you can engage and acquire 60-80% response rates, and define and drive an effective follow-up process? You might want to consider bundled services so that you don’t need to do any configuration/administration and can focus on your business, while the “vendor” assists you with genuine best-practices guidance. Every provider has standard templates but they aren’t tailored to your business and segmentation strategy.
How will you implement so that you “get the right feedback from the right people at the right time” – is there a way to trigger NPS process based on customer-lifecycle, not a “blast” to too customers or require manual account selection? The right accounts and contacts should be asked to provide feedback at the right time (i.e. key moments of truth – onboarding, time to value, well in advance of renewal, etc). Make sure you’re not asking questions of contacts that don’t matter – persona-based questionnaires are very important (e.g. an end-user can’t assess value for price), as are cohort/segment based so you’re not asking “low-touch” accounts the same questions as high-touch/strategic accounts…
What’s your budget? Nothing I’ve discussed here should total up to more than $10k-$25k per year. Be careful with “per seat” licensing -- ESPECIALLY if you're thinking you will use your CS tool -- because you want the feedback to be accessible to the entire company, and also be careful with “per email” pricing because you’ll certainly want to look for census, not sample.

Tanuj Diwan

This defintely helps @Manan Joshi And the implementer is a part of CS team or Insights?

Manan Joshi

Hi Tanuj,

For customer success platform, the decision makers for us were our CCO along with CRO. The evaluation was lead by Myself and a couple of our CS leads. NPS and CSAT are run by Marketing team along with inputs from CSMs.

We do have a Gainsight admin who helped us with implementaion along with two CSMs who raised their hands to help.

Hope this helps!

-Manan

Tanuj Diwan

Thanks Alex, ans how about choosing NPS or CSAT tools, using Gainsight for that too or a different software?

And who were users/implementers of that software?

Will Pagden

Yes, although on this one the issue is our in house CRM (or its product owners!) there is things that could have been done but as I mentioned, it hasnt been managed well enough so now resource is not available to do that.

Tanuj Diwan

I completely understand this Will, we have a similar problem here that who will be actually responsible for shooting those surveys, maintaining the customer database. Most of the decisions maker are actually not the users of the product and if a person is not assigned it creates a massive problem in realizing the value of that tool.

Also, have you tried integrating your in-house CRM with CS tool to avoid this 2-week process?

Will Pagden

Great question. I am 2 weeks into a new role and they had purchased a new CS platform 9 months ago. (It's still not fully live!)

One thing I would say is make sure you map out the requirements well in advance and include people from all departments. For example, we are now struggling to ingest data from our in house CRM which means new customers can only be loaded every 2 weeks. With our product however we have a 2 week TTV so its too late.

Key lesson for me in joining this company was, make sure you have an overarching person who has a level of responsibility for the project otherwise it turns into personal battles about resource and importance rather than whats right.

Alex Tran

Hi @Tanuj Diwan !

In a past company, we had the Director of Customer Success select the CS tool, which ended up to be Gainsight. Ultimately, the CEO and CFO had to sign off on it. At the time, we had a little less than 10 CSMs.

Each organization is different and you need to approach it according to the maturity of your CS org, company, number of team members, etc.

Hope this helps!