A Customer Success team looks after your users' well-being and makes sure that every interaction with your business is a positive one.
Their work starts at the Activation stage of the AARRR funnel. They help people who have signed up to get up & running quickly, and they follow on through the Retention stage to support your customers and make sure that their needs are met.
Focus areas:
Key questions:
Which channel(s) do we want to focus on this quarter?
Do we need to improve our relationship with Sales/Growth/Product?
Do we need to optimize costs in some areas?
How can we mix big bets with low-hanging fruits?
Setting Customer Success OKRs
You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
Scenario
Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. Their Sales team has been doing a great job in Australia so far, but it’s time for them to expand to new markets.
General advice
Take advantage of your Objectives to be specific about your growth opportunities. Avoid statements like "Increase revenues", or "Double the amount of customers". It's pretty obvious that we want to grow the business, and vague statements won't help other teams understand how they can help with sales.
Good Objectives should help anyone understand where to focus their energy. "Increase revenues" leaves too much room for interpretation. "Expand to European markets" will produce more focused initiatives, and your Product team can align their own goals to support different regions.
Examples of Customer Success OKRs
OKRs to improve responsiveness
Make responsiveness a priority for new users
Stay above a rating of 4 stars for all customer feedback on support calls
Decrease First Reply Time from 6h to 20 minutes
OKRs to reduce activation churn
Reduce activation churn with high-touch onboarding
Increase engagement with onboarding drip from 10% to 20%
Improve survey scores from 3.2 to 4.1 for personalized onboarding calls
OKRs to leverage positive feedback
Leverage positive feedback to build brand authority
Gain 40 public reviews with 4+ stars across all platforms
Publish 10 customer case studies
Tracking your OKRs
Knowing how to write good OKRs is critical, but without good tracking in place, the OKRs will fade away and focus will be lost.
The easier it is for a team to have weekly discussions around the OKRs, the better they'll execute. Here are a few best practices for tracking OKRs.
1. Do weekly check-ins
Quarterly OKRs should be tracked every week to be effective. Without a continuous reflection on progress, your OKRs won't be much different from having KPIs.
The check-ins process can be automated with a platform like Tability that takes care of reminders, and distribute updates to the teams.
2. Keep track of your confidence
Good progress updates should help everyone understand how far we are from our goal, but also how confident we are in achieving it. You can use a simple red/yellow/green color coding to indicate your confidence.
3. Make trends easy to see
Lastly, it's important to look at trends to avoid false positives. It's not rare for a team to have a hot start and then slow down mid quarter. This will be hard to see unless you can look at progress trends for individual Key Results.
What other Customer Success metrics can you use?
Now that you've got good Objectives, it's time to pick some key results and finding good metrics that work for your team can be tricky. Lucky for you, we've laid out all the best success metrics for your teams to use.
Here are a few to get you started:
Metrics related to Activation
Activation rate
How many evaluators turn into active users?
Onboarding churn
The opposite of activation. How many evaluators drop during the onboarding sequence?
Engagement
How people interact with your product.
Satisfaction survey scores
Results of surveys sent after the onboarding sequence is completed.
Metrics related to Retention
Retention rate
Percentage of users that keep returning to your product after a certain number of days/weeks/month.
Contact rate
Number of customer inquiries occurring in a given time period.
Average resolution time
Average time that it takes to resolve customer inquiries.
NPS / Support NPS
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to measure the loyalty of customers to a company.
App ratings
Public ratings of your app or product (in marketplaces, review websites, etc).
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