CS Leadership Office Hours is a 1-hour Zoom every Thursday at 11:30am EST. It connects B2B SaaS customer success leaders in an open-dialogue to solve challenges.
Your Customer Success Dashboard: What's on it? We want to learn about what you report to your cross-functional peers, executive team and board to keep them informed about your customers and revenue health.
🚨 Outside of revenue, what are the 3-5 metrics that really matter?
↠ It is easy to start with financial metrics and lagging health indicators in your dashboards that you are reporting to executives, but over time you need to start including some of the leading indicators for customer health.
🚨 What kind of tools are in use?
↠ Leaders should be careful to think about the reporting needs and if there are foundational processes in place before going to implement a tool for the sake of dashboards.
↠ Starting with a home-grown version out of Excel is a great way to understand what your true needs are before you invest in a tool. As you mature your processes and establish a good management structure for your reporting, implementing a data visualization tool or a CS-tech platform will be much easier and more impactful!
🚨 How is this information shared?
↠ Complete transparency in the data that is reviewed is something that keeps team members of all levels aligned and engaged on the right things. We heard of self-service dashboards, all-hands reviews of the metrics, and consistent reporting as ways to keep everyone up to date.
↠ To this effect, a roll-up structure, in which all organization levels have sets of metrics that they report up to their leadership, allows for company wide aggregation of metrics, depicting a clear picture of the areas that need to be addressed.
ONE ACTION TO IMPLEMENT
Understanding that there is a difference between the 2 Dimensional view (just revenue) and the 3 Dimensional view (leading indicators). In order to tell a complete story, you need to have both.
🚨 What's on the dashboard?
↠ Activity x Quality = outcomes
↠ Internal goals shared by all departments, with customer desired goals will translate into revenue/outcomes
🚨 Were does the dashboard exist?
↠ You use what your company provides you, but ultimately its less about the system and more about the data. The system you use is only as good as the data that it is populating.
↠ Salesforce was one area where data lives
↠ Looker was also mentioned
🚨 How do you drive engagement with your Executive Team?
↠ Tie everything back to revenue
↠ Give your e-team what they want to know alongside snippets of what they need to know to help secure and separate Customer Success from Customer Support
🚨 How do you execute this with so many accounts at the SMB level?
↠ Less about individual accounts and more about trends
ONE ACTION TO IMPLEMENT
Start with the lagging indicators and present those on a regular basis. Start to project them out where possible. Then start working into Leading Metrics that impact the Lagging Metrics.