The Ultimate Metric for Every Customer Success Team!

There is only one ultimate metric for every Customer Success team to know and follow!

Really?...

It’s Sunday morning and after a good workout (thank you, Justin, for a great spinning class at the JCC!!), I sat on the sofa in our backyard with a cup of coffee to read a book. Isn’t it a good way to start the day? Spoiler alert: this slow-pace morning reading in the basking sun has quickly turned into this blog-post write-up. I’ll have to finish the book later…

In any event, here’s a miniature background on the book: in his slow, yet captivating book The Passion Fruit, (also published as "A Father's Affair") Dutch novelist Karel Glastra van Loon explores how we interact with the world around us, and particularly what we take for granted versus what we challenge. At one point, he discusses the concept of Exclusive Thinking: the idea that one view point excludes another. A good example to crystalize this concept is the theological versus scientific debate; in most cases one either follows one type of thinking towards an issue or another, but can’t follow both.

The character in Glastra’s book suggests that while exclusive thinking is very helpful in understanding many problems in the universe, taking it to an extreme might result in useless debates and intellectual paralysis. He provides a few excellent examples to that: the debate around what makes us who we are: genes versus experiences / nature versus nurture. Or debates between free market believers and guided economies, male versus female characteristics. Other examples quickly come to mind: eastern versus western medicines, formal education versus on-the-job training, and more.

Reading this section caused me to pause and think for a minute (and then drop the book to capture my thoughts here…). In the age of the internet and the interest of people to gain visibility and "likes", there are countless articles and blog posts that utilize the Exclusive Thinking concept to a fault. I cringe every time I read an article titled something like: “The Most Important…”, or “The One Thing Every…” and definitely: “The Ultimate Goal for…”.

I have always tried to shy away from such exclusivity, and Glastra’s book gave me the definition, the explanation for my intuitive challenge with this point of view.

Let’s take my area of focus in business: Customer Success. Search the net and you’ll find endless articles and blog posts debating what is the primary objective of the CS team, what is the most important goal of the team, what is the one metric that is most important, etc.  Wouldn’t you agree that suggesting a One Ring to Rule Them All is fundamentally wrong?

My experience – aided by many excellent mentors, coaches, and observation of people at work around me – leads me to believe that the key to success in business is balance, not exclusivity. There is never a single most important trait or goal: there is always a balance between competing ones. Successful business people are those who understanding the different vectors impacting their business and are able to assemble a system that balances them.

The key to success in business is balance, not exclusivity

Let’s assess, for example, the basic question of the objective of a company. Exclusive Thinking would try to debate whether “The Most Important Objective of a Company” is to increase shareholder value, generate wealth/utility to its employees, maximize value to its customers or even contribute to the surrounding environment/economy. But trying to select one of those makes no sense to me. Long-term success can only be achieved if all stakeholders benefit and a balance is created among these vectors. Moreover, smart and successful managers will shift the balance among those vectors along time. If the company had experienced a severe service breakdown, for example, it should focus on increasing value to its customers for a good amount of time on the expense of other stakeholders: employees may need to engage in extra-long hours of work, shareholders will need to agree to higher costs of running the business and diminished/delayed dividends from it, etc.

When it comes to the function of Customer Success, near and dear to my heart, the same type of debates often arises. Isn’t it futile to debate whether the most important goal for a CS team is the success of the customer or the success of the vendor (from the customer)? Wouldn’t you agree that the ONLY way a company can be successful long-term is if it generated high value to BOTH their customers AND themselves?

The same goes when you set up goals and objectives for your team. Do companies really need to choose between Gross Churn and Net Churn as an objective? Between revenue from the customer and ROI to the customer? Why not set objectives for the team against both (or multiple) and weigh the results for an overall performance metric? Isn’t it much more powerful to understand multiple facets of the business in order to assess the real strength of the business?

Next time you face a question or read an article, you may want to challenge the Exclusive Thinking to select one over the other. Rather, you may find it useful to assess whether the two points of view can complement one another and add to the overall solution.

...and personally, I hope to read more posts where people help me understand and provide advice on how to balance objectives and combine factors rather than those who try to convince me that one thing is more important than another.