Uncomplicate – How to measure customer success
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
There are multiple ways companies can measure customer success, such as CSAT, net promoter score, customer churn percentage. But how does this translate to action from people in the management and leadership team? How do you ensure that leaders don’t look at customer support and customer success as teams tangential to the business, but actually work towards removing roadblocks and enabling employees to see to it that customers don’t face issues regularly?
Lynn Hunsaker, the chief customer officer at ClearAction Continuum, recommends that managers translate these metrics into financial data. After all, dollar figures and revenue data always hit hard. The point of sharing metrics with the management is so they can take notice of underlying issues and fix them.
“How about quantifying how much revenue is represented by those customers and those issues that they’re bringing up,” Lynn said, also suggesting that companies could also calculate how much time companies spend trying to handle chronic issues that customers face.
“It is much more compelling to show a percentage of customers at risk of churning, a percentage of revenue and cost that were really going the wrong way for the organization,” Lynn said. “When you can quantify things in figures of currency, it makes a lot more sense to executives and stimulates them to move out of inaction to being your ally.”
Lynn proposes the concept of customer experience annuities. The idea is to prevent the recurrence of thorny issues that are bothering customers, particularly those things that are caused by the company rather than by the customer themselves. This helps stream funds that are being spent on fixing customer issues into something of greater value.
“With customer experience, our initial opportunity is in cost redirection,” Lynn pointed out.
Often, employees and other resources are tied up in addressing issues that recur frequently and companies don’t pay attention to fixing the underlying problem. Translating customer experience and customer success metrics into numbers will help fix this. “We need to stimulate our executives and managers to think that this isn’t a safe zone and to see the actual damage being done to the brand and to the resources so that they can remove those issues, prevent them from occurring, and allow people to be more proactive with other things and add more value,” Lynn said.
(This post was co-produced by Praveen Ramesh.)
