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In addition to monitoring usage to get ahead of any problems, a successful customer success function needs to understand and quantify users’ success—and then make sure to tell them about it! In business speak, this evidence of success is often known as outcomes.
In the sales process, you promised certain kinds of business value to your customer. Instrumenting the achievement of that value is important for a variety of reasons. When customers can see that they are achieving the desired business value, they’re more likely to stay customers. Moreover, by documenting and capturing success outcomes, you’ll be able to use that information in go-to-market materials, like sales decks, customer success stories, and so forth—more on that later in the chapter. There are a couple of ways to go about this.
If you can design your product in a way that captures outcome value, all the better. At TalentBin, we had a concept of stages associated with candidate profiles, and one of those stages was Hired. If people were buying TalentBin to help them hire hard-to-find engineering talent, chronicling when that happened was one of the most direct ways of proving its value.
Sometimes successful outcomes may be harder to capture, so you can look to instrument the precursors to that outcome value as well.
exampleIf you were Textio, you could capture the number of job postings that had been improved, and what the level of improvement was, by comparing the Textio score of the job requisitions before and after optimization. Of course, the best of all worlds for Textio would be capturing that precursor behavior and also capturing the improvements of job-view-to-apply, phone-screen-to-apply, and phone-screen-to-hire ratios that even more concretely prove the value of the product.
Sometimes instrumenting value directly in the product is challenging. Moreover, while quantitative indicators of value achievement are great, they leave out more qualitative measures. For both of these reasons, eliciting value attainment feedback directly from users can be really helpful. There are a variety of ways that you can go about this, and some may be more doable than others depending on the scale of your customer base. The simplest approach is just being mindful to ask your users what they’ve accomplished when you interact with them or during scheduled catch-up calls. For instance, we discussed the notion of a 30-day check-in call. Part of that call could be focused specifically on documenting value that the user has achieved (or not achieved, in which case, you now know what you need to fix).
More involved versions of asking your customers include survey software for net promotion scoring (NPS) like AskNicely, Delighted, and so on. You can implement surveys to automatically send at certain times (for example, 45 days after initial kickoff) or can even be embedded directly in the UI. You can customize them to not only capture standard net promotion data like, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?” but also explicitly ask value capture questions like, “Does this make you more efficient?” or, “How many hires have you made?” and so on.
However you capture this information, it’s important that you do it in a way that is reportable after the fact. Your CRM can be a great way to do this. If you can get proactive about capturing these success signifiers as Activities with time stamps on them, suddenly you can report on them to answer questions like, “How quickly do customers get to ROI payback?” or, “What proportion of our customers get to what level of success in the first month? Second month? Third month?”
There are all kinds of benefits to instrumenting and capturing success signifiers. But you can’t forget to reflect this customer success information back to the customers themselves. That might sound a little weird—if they’re having success, you’d think they’d know, right? No! Customers are super busy, use dozens of tools, and have all kinds of competing vendors whispering in their ears that their software would provide a better, faster, smarter solution than yours. You need to do a good job of documenting and reflecting back the success your customers are having, so it’s super clear that they’re getting that all-important ROI.
If you’re proactive about sharing this ROI information, great things happen. You’ll be top of mind with users and decision-makers, who will understand why this was a great investment of their time and budget. And if there are other potential users of your solution in the organization, it’ll be that much easier for you to sell more seats. These decision-makers and users also interact with friends and colleagues that share their business challenges. Making sure your ROI proof is readily available will arm them to be great promoters to others. And it helps cement their existing commitment bias ( aren’t they smart for choosing you?), which is very helpful if competitors and alternative solutions show up in their inboxes. Why would you open an email about a competing solution when you know that you’re getting great value from the one you’re using?
cautionIf you don’t do a good job reminding customers of their successes, the opposite can happen. You’ll miss out on upsell opportunities, as no one is clear on why your solution is a great investment. You’ll miss out on word of mouth because your decision-makers and users aren’t armed to advance those arguments for you. And you’ll leave yourself wide open for competitors to come in, making a case that their solutions can provide more value. Not good.