Are Your Customers Actually Using Your Application?

The question points at the essence of the role and purpose of Customer Success groups. Are your customers actually using your application to accomplish real tasks that create value? Can you prove your answer? If not, that has to be considered as an at-risk customer. What’s worse, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest the wrong answer here means that you’re an at-risk Customer Success professional. Customer Realized Value is where the rubber needs to meet the road, and it needs to be at the core of how the Customer Success group is perceived by both customers and your company.

If I asked people from the other departments of your company — Sales, Marketing, Product, perhaps even members of the Board, etc., “What’s the role of our Customer Success group?” What answers would I get? If the responses were inconsistent, and were not directly tied to significant company profitability, would you be comfortable with that scenario?

These are not new questions, unfortunately. They’ve been asked worldwide ever since the proliferation of Customer Success groups began over 15 years ago. What does it mean to us as a profession that they are still being asked, and not answered conclusively, today? The answer can be seen in the increasing mentions of layoffs of CS people all over the social media sector, and in the myriad claims that the advent of ai will make Customer Success groups obsolete and unnecessary.

Can you prove that your customers are using your product to accomplish real jobs and to produce measurable value for their companies? I’ll bet that most of you haven’t made that case to either your customers or your companies. Why? Because when I ask: “Do you have the capability to track the usage of specific features in your application by customers?” the few responses I get indicate that either you don’t have that capability or that it hasn’t been used.

Let’s start there, with the basic data capability. If it wasn’t designed into your application code, then you’ll need to add it with an external utility. I’ve added a new category to the TechMap for Specific Application Feature Usage Tracking systems, and there currently are 6 vendors on the list. Do you know of others? Once you’ve added the capability, then we can talk about how to use it effectively to measure Customer Realized Value.