Run value-based business reviews with Freshdesk Customer Success

How to head into Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meetings with clear plans to hit your most ambitious goals

Customer success managers (CSMs) spend a considerable amount of time designing quarterly or executive business reviews to drive value and demonstrate ROI for customers. They’re seen as the experts in showing the way the products and services change the business for the better and need to be prepared to plan the success of each customer within their portfolio throughout the engagement lifecycle. 

Business reviews showcase the impact and value of your success team’s efforts to both internal and external stakeholders. However, it’s never enough to just walk through a presentation. Time spent with key decision-makers is crucial to the partnership, so you need to make sure that these meetings are as important to customers as to CSMs and your business. 

How do you maintain engagement and buy-in for key stakeholders, so they don’t just attend the review meeting but also look forward to them?

Defining your business review processes

We recommend starting off by identifying the right engagement style for the right customers. An ideal business review cadence depends on some of the factors below:

  • Customer’s expectation – some customers would like to have their first business review happen sooner and more often, while others might not need it for more than once a year.
  • Your ideal engagement model – when and how often the CSMs should reach out to the customer.
  • Key topics that need to be covered in each business review – and how much effort it takes for the CSM to gather the metrics required and prepare a shareable customer presentation, as well as
  • The portfolio size of your CSMs – how many business reviews they can handle in a month

Once you have segmented your customers based on their lifecycle stages or engagement strategy, you’ll be able to decide when your business review process should kick start and the desired touchpoints and action items before and after the business review to drive an effective and meaningful business review.

High-touch, value-driven business reviews

When in doubt, we recommend using the following business review process as a best practice example for your high touch and nurture customer cohorts. Ideally, your CSMs should begin prepping as early as 60 days prior to the expected date, with the following action items:

  • Two months before the business review: 
    • Conduct regular health-check meetings to review customers’ current adoption, struggles, and outstanding support issues. 
    • Stay on the same page as the customer in terms of short-term goals and priorities.
    • Coordinate and schedule the business review with the key stakeholders.
    • Work with cross-functional teams to understand the timelines and action items.
    • Identify measurable metrics that are aligned with the customer’s short-term goals and objectives.
    • Gather details from the product team on the future roadmap.
  • A month before the business review: 
    • Put together a business review deck (based on the playbook template) for the customer that includes the details gathered from the above steps.
    • Refine the deck as needed with updates on timeline and progress for priority items.
  • Once the meeting concludes:
    • Provide the meeting summary and an action plan that was mutually agreed upon during the meeting.

Operationalize business reviews with Freshdesk Customer Success

The key is to understand what your customers are really looking for in terms of value from your product and use those as recommendations to track their progress. In simple terms, this means setting up the right goals and starting with a template that functions as a planning blueprint to set expectations right for customers as well as the CSMs working with them. 

Leverage Success Goals to track the business review process recommended above to provide structure and guidance for your CSMs — you can also automate this goal based on ideal trigger rules and recurring intervals.

Get started with a Business Review Goal template

With Goal templates in Freshdesk Customer Success, you can easily create a templated playbook for business reviews and automate the deployment of the goal for your CSMs — simply tweak the rules for different segments of your customers, for instance: 

  • For newer accounts that are less than 90 days old, this Goal can auto-start for the first time at 90 days from an account’s join date and re-deploy every 90 days. 
  • For older accounts, this Goal can auto-start for all of them and re-deploy every 90 days. 

 

During the actual review meeting, you can then help engage your audience and make the most of your time together with a well-planned, accessible agenda and use the Goals and playbooks to track opportunities and action items to set you up for success by your next QBR meeting.

Setting up a QBR with Touchpoints in Freshdesk Customer Success

When it comes to scheduling these high-value meetings, the mandate for CSMs is quite simple: 

  • Cover relevant topics and desired outcomes. This is easy when you have the Goals and playbooks in place — these are the outcomes you are driving towards and your customers are invested in tracking performance against the metrics you’re measuring. 
  • Ensure to share the agenda in advance. This is project management 101 and helps keep the meeting around the focus areas. Sharing the relevant documents and setting expectations around time limits to cover the discussion items helps everyone stay on track. 
  • Track action items and follow-ups. QBR meetings generate questions and opportunities for the future. Hit the ground running by creating tasks to track action items and questions as they arise, so you can follow up on them after the meeting wraps.

With the Freshdesk Customer Success Touchpoints feature, CSMs can do all of the above from a single interface. In addition, admin users can template out the steps to be taken by CSMs in preparation for a QBR and tie it to a renewal goal. This makes it effortlessly easy for CSMs to then follow this “by-the-book” approach to stay organized and retain context for all the stakeholders involved.

Get started with Touchpoints meetings management

Once again here, with Freshdesk Customer Success, you can template out the preparatory checklists associated with regular meetings and remind CSMs to schedule them in advance. 

These “touchpoints” can be integrated into the playbook of a Goal and auto-deployed for CSMs.

Once a Touchpoint is created and the meeting has concluded, your CSMs can use the meeting workspace to go over the agenda items, map the right Goals and Tasks to the meeting updates, capture the meeting minutes and send out the recap emails.

All of these updates to the meeting workspace in turn automatically are captured within the respective Goals and Tasks to help retain context for all the stakeholders. 

In summary

Business Reviews are where you review progress on customer goals, reinforce the value the customer gets from your product, and discuss how you can support new goals or initiatives they have. 

Designing an effective business review process is critical to successful renewal and ongoing retention.  It allows you to stay up to date with customers’ objectives and take a consultative value-delivery approach without demanding a constant time commitment from the customers.

It’s important to leave your customers with solid takeaways at the end of a review — things that can be acted upon quickly but also things that might be something that they have to incorporate longer-term to make it really tangible and really tactical because if they can see value from what you’re recommending then you’ll have trust and credibility when doing more reviews down the lane for them.

An important often overlooked aspect is talking about the product itself. While marketing may be sending out feature updates and talking about new releases, your customers could very well not be reading a lot of those emails and may not be aware of all the updates and fixes to the product. So, there is value in going over the latest product features during the reviews. 

On a final note, however, even while you have a template design in place and a story with solid snapshots and recommendations for the business review, don’t be afraid to switch gears when customers bring very different talking points to the discussion — these add insights into their expectations and should actually become part of the success plans you craft for them.