In the first of my posting series on Customer Adoption, a CS exec commented: “If nobody owns a concrete “value realized” metric, your adoption numbers are mostly vibes.” I couldn’t agree more. I’m suggesting that a new metric for Customer Success be created to measure Customer Realized Value. For if we are serious about the definition of the profession — Customer Success is a scientifically designed and professionally directed long term business strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven profitability — then we need to be able to prove our case about profitability to both the customer and the company.
Customer Realized Value
The CS exec’s approach to a Customer Realized Value score was to map 3-5 core workflows per segment, such as
- Close a ticket
- Ship a campaign
- Publish a report
- Invoice reconciled, etc.
They then added a simple value proxy on each
- time saved
- revenue touched
- risk avoided, etc.
–and built a per-account value score that CS and Product reviewed every week.
What’s Your Approach?
Is anybody else doing this kind of calculation and review to determine the value that the customer gets from using your technology? Analyzing for Customer Realized Value? If so, what tools do you use to track specific feature utilization? What effects does having this data produce in your company? Who wants to see it? How much domain expertise is required in order to set up the specific value per accomplished job data?
Recommended Reading
Do You Know What Your Customers Are Doing With Your Application’s Feature Set?
Customer Success and the Catalog of Outcomes and Values
