How to become a data-driven CSM - Part II

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM delivering more value for your customers and revenue for your company every week.

Need additional help? Check out these resources 👇️ 

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Last week, we started the journey to becoming a data-driven CSM by exploring customer basic data. This data describes your customers’ needs which are defined by

• goals and success metrics

• problems and root causes

• level of skills and knowledge

and sets the context for the entire customer engagement. These needs are the raw material for creating dedicated customer success plans.

Your customer success plans are the visualization of the (planned) journey that lies ahead of the customer. The roadmap that outlines the steps they need to take to accomplish their goals

In today’s post, you will learn how to capture meaningful data across the customer journey and use it to improve its outcome.

1. Product Usage

Many CSM teams are obsessed with increasing product usage. They have been taught that high product usage is the equivalent of customers seeing success.

If that were true there would be zero churn in this particular customer segment. Turns out things are not that simple. If you want to get accurate insights you need to view product usage from a differentiated perspective.

1.1 No/Low Usage

While high usage does not equal success it’s logical that if customers are not using the product they won’t become successful. The same is true if usage is below a certain minimum.

This minimum is different for different kinds of products and also depends on your customers’ and your needs. A startup hiring 10 people per year will use a recruiting tool rather than a Fortune 500 company hiring 100x as many.

If the product usage is not high enough compared to what you’d expect based on the use cases these customers are a default churn risk. You need to find out what keeps these customers from taking action.

1.2 High Usage

High usage is not the equivalent of customers seeing success but there’s a correlation between. My point is simply that you should not leave those customers unattended because you believe they are a safe bet.

For some products, it does not even make sense to spend a lot of time using it. If you are selling accounting software it’s the nature of the subject itself that your customers spend a lot of time using it.

If you are selling a CRM the situation is entirely different. You will not find a single salesperson who wants to spend as much time as possible using your product. A high usage would suggest that they might be struggling in this case and you need to address it.

1.3 Usage Patterns

This is why the most important part of the usage analysis is the qualitative part. You need to understand what your customers are actually doing with your product.

Additional scenarios you could run into are customers using the wrong features or using them in the wrong order - put differently, they are not following the plan.

2. Content and Services

Customer Success happens bottom up. Your job is not to do the job for your customers. It’s to enable your customers to do it themselves. It’s about helping them to build excellence on the job they need your product for.

A dedicated success plan does not only outline the problems customers need to solve and the tasks they need to complete in the process. It also contains recommendations for the content and services customers should consume.

• guides

• tutorials

• webinars

• office hours

• workshops

• 1:1 consulting

• …

However, that does not mean customers are doing what they are supposed to do. The customer with the 20 unsent campaigns might have studied the guide on how to set them up properly. However, they might not have used the resources that would help them to create valuable content or sales copy.

This is important when customers have failed to accomplish their (partial) goals. It could be subject to your next meeting with the customer or, in a worst-case scenario, a post-mortem churn analysis.

3. Customer Feedback

For too long, customer feedback has not been taken seriously. It’s been reduced to asking customers “How would you rate x?” and “How likely do you y?” That does not give you any meaningful insights.

Customers don’t know how to rate accurately. The results depend on whether customers are having a good or a bad day. Customers give fake high scores because they don’t want to trigger your “low-NPS-customer-engagement” playbook.

And even if you get an accurate response, you don’t know why customers picked this particular number. The alternative is to put in the effort and ask for qualitative feedback.

Why did customers spend so much time without being successful? Why did they skip the recommended content or services? Why are they stuck?

Your goal is to understand what worked, what did not, and why with an emphasis on negative deviations that need to be addressed.

• Was the success plan inaccurate?

• Was relevant information missing?

• Was the quality of resources inadequate?

• Was it something else?

Getting quality customer feedback frequently - at least at every QBR - is essential to fixing customer issues on time and on the first attempt. 30 days before the renewal date is too late. A tedious fourth and back with trial and error unacceptable.

And if it’s not an individual issue - like when information for a recurring use case is missing - provide a “global” solution.