You can't improve what you can't measure
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” It’s an old management adage that is still accurate today. Unless you measure something, you don’t know if it is getting better or worse, and that’s true with your onboarding practices.
On-boarding is the most critical phase in any SaaS company's customer lifecycle journey. Customer Success teams are investing significant resources to ensure that their onboarding process is as effective as possible so that a new customer can reach the first value and form a positive impression of your product in a timely manner.
When changes are made to this process, it would be valuable to measure the impact of those changes on your desired outcomes.
Measure the impact of your processes
Natero's advanced analytics enables this by allowing you to analyze customer groups who went through different onboarding processes with cohort analysis. Cohort analysis allows you to break customers up into meaningful groups and compare their engagement and retention. To measure the effect of your onboarding, you would compare the group of customers that went through your previous process with the group of customers that went through your new process. You can compare these groups using a variety of Customer Success measurements, including health scores, adoption rates, activity levels, etc.
For example, if you were to change your onboarding process to include a success kick-off call with each new customer to understand their key business objectives. You would be interested in learning what kind of an impact that’s had on overall customer engagement and activity.
You can analyze customer groups who went through different onboarding processes using cohort analysis. In the example above, you would compare the cohort of customers that went through the old onboarding process, with the cohort of customers that went through the new process and see how retention, engagement or health were affected.
This type of analysis allows you to measure the impact of those process changes, make adjustments to them, and verify the improvements you were hoping to achieve. Your team will be empowered to tweak, measure, analyze and repeat with data-driven insights.
Beyond onboarding
Tracking customer progress through a lifecycle journey isn’t limited to just the onboarding phase. Natero's advanced analytics can help you optimize customer success at any point in their journey, and that means maximizing customer lifetime value.
For example, similar analyses can be applied to measure the impact of many other CSM processes to allow you to answer questions such as:
- Did adoption rates of accounts increase following a QBR?
- Did changes to a training program lower support ticket incidents?
- Which Playbook tasks are having the biggest success rate in addressing churn alerts?
Being able to measure and understand the impact of CSM processes on various customer success metrics has even more benefits.
You can set specific CSM process goals - either at the team or individual level - such as “% of customers successfully on-boarded”, “days to onboard”, “avg. health score”, “feature adoption level”, “activity ranks”; and leverage Natero’s analytic functions to keep measuring and driving continuous improvements in your various CSM practices to achieve these goals.