CS Ops Kpis and measurements

Good morning GGR,

We created a CS ops area last year where we have a small team dedicated to things like Recruitment support, Onboarding and ongoing training of CSMs, Owner of the Customer 1 to many engagement opportunities (like webinars, office hours, User Groups), Communication enablement (like marketing or other areas who have asks of CSMs, will go through us).

Now I am looking for KPIs or something to measure and show the value of our work.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Celine

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Jodi Millen

Hi Celine!

This is a really great question and other members are providing excellent answers. I thought I would chime in with a thought.
In some of my previous business development and account management roles (which all included client happiness and success responsibilities) demonstrating the value of BD and AM to product and service teams and sales teams could be a challenging order. Essentially, it came down to this: How does keeping customers happy grow business? Many of the companies I have worked for and with had no concept of measuring "happiness" and what came out of that happiness. But here are some of the things I was able to put metrics against and track.

Firstly, happiness grew customer trust. With that trust, came the relationship. From the relationship came real conversations - both happy and difficult ones. From those conversations came insights into where the customer was benefiting, stagnating - and sometimes losing - in their relationship with my company's products and services. Sometimes it was as simple as tracking how many times a customer said they didn't sleep well because of work issues or how many times they avoided my attempts to talk about product or service expansion. Those observations led to deeper dives which in every case revealed that the customer account was at risk and in several cases, save the account. I was actually able to build a tracking sheet of key risk indicators, record occurrences, and flag when occurrences hit a certain level.

By tracking, I was able to measure and compare the accounts where we had that kind of insight and those where we did not and then compare notes with sales and product teams. In every case where an account was deemed seriously risk or lost altogether, there were only superficial relationships with the user(s) and decision-maker(s) at the account and therefore almost no insight into what was really going on behind the scenes. Into those that were retained and grown, there was insight.

What does CSM allow a company to learn that it would otherwise never know? How can that information benefit other teams: sales, operations, product, etc.?

These are the questions I like to measure. Hope this is not too long of a response!

Ed Powers

@Celine Bocchi, I suggest you and your team start by defining your Purpose (or Mission) which describes why the team exists and the basic value it seeks to contribute. From there, measurable outcomes should become apparent.

For example, many years ago I was in Field Operations at HP. The team's Purpose was "To increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the Sales organization" and it measured outcomes such as salesperson productivity (Quota $/FTE), win rates, and Cost per Order Dollar (CPOD). These were factors over which the team had a great deal of influence because of the work they did training Field Engineers, outfitting them with technology tools, improving processes, etc. It was not measured on quota achievement, which was the responsibility of the Sales organization, avoiding the indirect measurement problem you note. Once the outcomes were clear and measurable, teams defined and managed process performance measures (or leading indicators) that produced these outcomes, such as quality, delivery, and cost-effectiveness of training interventions, IT projects delivered on time and on budget, etc. All team members formally reviewed these metrics at least monthly and they participated in process improvement projects on an ongoing basis, keeping them fully engaged and highly committed to constantly improving team performance.

Hope that helps!

Ed

Celine Bocchi

Thanks for the suggestions, keep em coming!

We do have some goals based on renewals and such, but we have a very indirect impact since for the most part we are enabling CSMs and have no direct contact with clients.

Some of the ones I was thinking of that show a more direct value of our work would be something like:
1) % of Increase of client participation in our 1 to many offerings like Webinars and User Groups.
2) Adoption rate of the roll out of an internal CRM system roll out
3) perhaps results of a satisfaction survey of the CSMs we have onboarded

Any thoughts?

Thanks!
Celine

Jeff Heckler

Hi @Celine Bocchi,

CS Ops exists to drive the CS Dept's goals.

I've simply tied those directly to the performance metrics of our CS Dept, which are derived from our Corp Goals - and broken down from there directly to, and for, my IC's performance metrics.

Additionally, I've built quarterly bonus programs paid out to my CS Ops team members.

For example:

If I have three (3) customer-facing CS Teams within my Dept.: CSMs, and two pooled CS teams,

their performance is rolled up to each account for 1/3 of my CS Ops Team's bonus structure,

paid out on an accelerated variable scale.

The financial model for the $ amount paid out is derived (and justified to my CFO) from the $ contribution those teams contribute to the CS Dept, and thus, the company.

I hope this helps.

Jeff Heckler

Director of Customer Success Solutions

MarketSource, Inc.

[Deleted User]

Hi Celine, to me the measure of the operations team work is the results of the team/s you support. Are they hitting their targets and milestones? is the # 1 question I ask relative to the work of our ops teams. #2 is do we have the visibility we need into the lines of business they support?