Driving Growth and Adoption While Creating Customers for Life
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast features Dave Yusuf, Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Q2. This episode, hosted by Banoo Behboodi, focuses on the topic of creating a customer for life in services and the unique challenges, opportunities, and trends surrounding the process today. David — who has years of experience in both the customer success and professional services industries — shares his unique perspective on how to drive growth, adoption, and orchestrate the customer for life journey.
Below, you’ll find some highlights and key takeaways from the discussion. Banoo and Dave talk through the steps, challenges, and trends associated with turning every customer into a customer for life, and ask the following questions:
- What is a customer for life?
- How do you orchestrate a customer for life journey?
- How do you manage and synchronize all the various teams and customer journeys?
- How do you define, manage, and measure success across all customer journeys and teams?
- What is a balanced scorecard?
If you find yourself asking the same questions, listen to the entire 30-minute episode here.
Retaining Customers for Life is Key to Success in Services
Selling services successfully isn’t simply a matter of executing on delivery and then moving onto the next client. Post-sales efforts are critical in ensuring customers are satisfied, reference-able, and likely to come back for more business. According to Dave, “the challenge in creating customers for life is not a task that can be delivered by a single department within a company.” Keeping customers for life requires complete alignment across the numerous teams which play a role in the customer journey.
Dave reflects that, “In my experience, what I’ve found is that customers for life are created by orchestrating and managing the wholesale customer journey. There are several different journeys required for retaining satisfied customers, including: deployment, usage, adoption, customer care, customer resolution, and finally the customer success journey. If you can successfully manage these journeys in a parallel way where it leads to a business partner-like relationship with the customer, the outcomes are not only obvious ones, the things that we all care about (retention and growth), but it also creates a strong reference, which is critical in today’s digital social media driven business environment that we all operate in.”
The Challenges & Complexities of Retaining Customers for Life
It’s clear that retaining customers for life requires careful synchronization across teams and processes, but what are a few ways to improve the alignment across the organization, effectively measure, and streamline all of the moving parts?
Dave breaks down some of the complexities around keeping customers for life with an analogy to the wheels of a car: “I view the software firm as a car with four wheels, you have sales, customer success, and services, typically in the front, and you have product and support in typically the rear wheels… I think the best outcome around creating customers for life comes when you can become an all-wheel drive. Or you can drive alignment around these different functions to create momentum and velocity for the company.”
While the analogy is relatively straightforward, there are significant hurdles to overcome when trying to shift priorities and synchronize across teams and departments. Dave refers to optimizing the customer journey as “opening up a Pandora’s box of turf battles.” Optimizing the customer journey can be a bit painful when initially trying to merge teams, optimize processes, and synchronize various definitions and ways to measure success.
Getting Executive Agreement on Customer Journey Goals & KPIs
The only way you will be able to overcome the turf wars that can stand in the way of customer journey goals is by gaining executive agreement on the goals of the wider organization and an understanding of customers’ needs. Businesses that are optimizing their customer journeys have to be ready for a bit of discomfort as everyone reorients themselves around the main priority and measure of success — the customer.
According to Dave, successfully optimizing the customer journey requires “agreeing on the approach around how we’re gonna balance both the here and now goals, which are the departmental functional goals, but also the longer-term priorities and the customer priorities that we’re trying to drive.” Keeping customers for life and improving customer satisfaction and experience all starts at the executive level – their ability to agree on the actual wants and needs of the customer, how their services can solve their problems, and how their service is uniquely valuable in the market is essential.
Use a Balanced Scorecard Approach to KPIs
KPIs vary from one team to the next, so one key lever to adjust when optimizing the customer journeys and synchronizing teams is to look at all of the different success measurements from the customer’s perspective. As Dave puts it, “The goal is how do you create a view which measures and gives you a good gauge of these customer journeys? Like the deployment journey or resolution journey and not just the individual goals and objectives and KPIs for the departments, which may or may not translate into what the customer cares about. Customers really don’t care about your utilization or your margin and those kinds of things, they care about the end results and impact and ROI that they’re receiving from the solution.”
To put it simply, prioritize the metrics that the customer cares about, the metrics that make them more successful, and the ones that are likely to improve their experience. Success should be defined and measured by the customer. Adjust the way you set and measure goals to align entirely around the customer journey. Dave suggests “taking a balanced scorecard approach by aggregating the metrics which effectively measure the customer experience score for each of the functional teams – and more importantly for the customer journey segments that you’re trying to measure.”
Steps to Building and Using a Balanced Scorecard
- Use key metrics to calculate each individual journey-level score
- Aggregate journey-level scores into an overall customer experience score
- Turn metrics into a customer-facing scorecard, sharing the KPIs that actually matter to the customer and actually measure customer success.
- Establish a process for how to take action if scores are less than ideal or can be adjusted to improve experience
- Communicate a deliberate and aligned approach to improving scores
- Ensure all teams are aware of how metrics revealed in the scorecard translate to action and impact on customer experience.
One final thing Dave and Banoo discuss on the episode is the fact that, even where a business is using a form of a balanced scorecard today, that scorecard will not provide accurate or actionable insights without a customer-centric approach to each metric being measured. Balanced scorecards are only effective if they are actually measuring metrics that matter to the customer or their experience.
Dave shares, ”The big trap that people fall in – and we’ve been doing balanced scorecards for decades, so that’s not a new concept – the challenge is that all of those balanced scorecards are looking at the business only from our lens and looking at it from only what we care about…most business leaders and most organizations are very comfortable measuring from their lens, but struggle when they try to go and look at it from the customer’s angle.”
Setting up the right processes like balanced scorecards and aligning the right teams will only get an organization so far in the customer for life journey. It’s always important to take a step back and make sure that key metrics being measured actually make sense in terms of delivering long-term customer success and are not just part of a legacy process or internal necessity. In services, when customers are successful, you are successful — it’s likely that the metrics that most impact their experience should be prioritized, measured, and put on a balanced scorecard, where they can be reflected upon and acted upon by decision-makers across the business.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the discussion, listen to the entire 30-minute episode or read the transcript here. Subscribe to the The Professional Services Pursuit Podcast for expert advice, trends, and best practices surrounding professional services.
Want to Learn More?
The Kantata Professional Services Cloud was created specifically to solve the common challenges faced by services organizations today. Kantata enables exponentially more effective operations and scaling in today’s networked services economy.