24Metrics: How Do I Measure Customer Success?

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

—Peter Drucker

It's all about the Benjamins, baby.

—Puff Daddy

Whether you take your leadership lessons from Drucker or Diddy, you know that a huge part of the CCO's job is to help your colleagues understand the “scoreboard” for measuring Customer Success.

Over the years, we, as leaders, have developed various methods to quantify most aspects of business such as:

  • Finance: GAAP (or IFRS) accounting rules
  • Sales: Bookings methodologies
  • Marketing: “Marketing qualified leads”
  • Personal ego: Twitter followers

And yet, with all of these statistics, we still can't measure what is usually the greatest “hidden” asset in our business—our customer base. How are we doing with clients? Are we delivering value for them? Are they likely to stay with us? Are they fans of ours?

If you've studied the field, the Net Promoter Score was created to partially address these questions. But with the trend toward digital transformation, companies are awash in data about their clients that they could be using to measure client health.

Customer Health Scoring is the concept that you can integrate various signals about your clients in order to quantify your customer base. Our goals for this chapter are to show you how to build a Customer Health Scoring framework and point out what mistakes to avoid.

But just to motivate you first, let's go back to Kevin Meeks from Splunk. We asked Kevin how he sleeps at night ...

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