Leveraging Data to Drive Change: Customer Success Management vs. Support

“Why can’t we just work on this feature? My client really needs it!”

One of the most challenging parts of customer success is seeing a client struggling and knowing that by building a certain product enhancement they would be in a better place and be less of a churn risk.

Your Product and Engineering teams have limited resources and your company needs to be laser-focused on the direction it wants to head in. 

So how can customer success management and support teams drive real change?

It comes down to data. 

How Support Teams Can Leverage Data to Drive Change

The three main processes that Support teams need to implement to drive change are:

1. Implement ticket classification: Create a proper ticket closeout process and classify each ticket appropriately. Here are some recommended data elements that should be captured as your support team wraps up a ticket:

• Reason for reaching out
• Product area
• Effort needed

1. Capture customer satisfaction (CSAT): It’s critical to give your customers the opportunity to provide feedback. Typically accomplished through a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey or customer effort score (CES) survey, which can be sent during or after the ticket is completed. It’s important to start this process, review the data regularly, follow up with every response, and standardize your process for consistency.
2. Measure ticket response & duration: Analyzing typical support metrics such as first response time (FRT) and average duration help round out the overall picture of your Support team’s effectiveness. 

After analyzing the data, trends across your customer base should arise. You may see that clients are struggling with a certain area of the product, leading to a lower CSAT score so you have a sense that a certain area of the product is negatively impacting your customer base. This provides you with the necessary data to make an argument with the Product team for improvements.

How Customer Success Teams Can Leverage Data to Drive Change

The three main processes that Customer Success teams need to implement to drive change are

1. Create a system to prioritize top feature requests: Your Product team is looking for a priortized list of features rather than having to guestimate which items they should focus on. It’s best to create certain criteria to determine which feature requests should be prioritized, such as:

• Total annual recurring revenue (ARR) of the combined number of clients at-risk due to this feature gap
• Number of overall customers impacted
• Potential revenue lift

It could be that there is only one client that is impacted but it represents 10% of total ARR. It could be very costly if that client churns due to a certain feature not being implemented.

1. Track at-risk and churn reasons: The only good thing about churn is that it should give you data on improvements needed. 

The more examples you can produce to the Product team regarding missing features that led to churn or client unhappiness, the better the argument you can make to address this gap. 

1. Launch Voice of Customer (VOC) initiatives: Implement a VOC survey combined with other initiatives such as capturing client sentiment from meetings, post-implementation surveys, and in-app data capture such as net promoter score (NPS) surveys. More on launching a VOC survey can be found in this post. 

Weaving these initiatives together will help CS teams obtain the data they need to have critical feature gaps addressed and improve the business overall. While Support and Customer Succss have different methods, their end goal is the same: create customers for life.