Customer Success and the CS Dashboard

The Customer Success module is designed to gather data points on your client base to help you understand how to both manage your client relationships and develop strategies to align these customers with your product and service offerings.  

 

By gauging health and effort measurements for your client base, you will gain the knowledge needed to manage each account accordingly. Understanding the goals and strategies of your clients will keep you at the forefront of a true partnered relationship to reduce churn.  

 

Lifecycle insights have designed the Customer Success module to gather data from the following analysis points into an easy-to-digest set of charts and reports that is at-a-glance consumable, precise, and powerful. 

 

Segmenting

Segmenting calculates the level of effort and revenue return ratios of your customers into a segmented chart that will allow you to address stack alignment shortcomings or price point issues for your client base. 

 

Stack Alignment

Stack Alignment will show you how your customers are lined up with your product and service offerings.  Stack alignment can also determine effort metrics for your client base.  You can define marketing strategies, evaluate account manager performance, client acceptance/churn risk, and make the appropriate recommendations to your customers. 

 

Metrics

Health metrics which are determined by CSAT scoring, assessment scoring, and organizational knowledge can give you an insight retention risks of your clients.  You can create your own health metrics to measure current client health. You can also gauge upcoming effort metrics based on health issues you find.

Effort metrics are determined by factors such as the number of locations or employees, specific assessment requirements, stack alignment, support hours used, or specialized SLAs.  These metrics will help you gauge the level of effort needed to service each client. 

 

Goals

Understanding what your customer is focused on will allow you to set your business ahead by taking action now in order to be prepared for that next big project or opportunity your customers are working towards.  This will allow you to align yourself as a partner rather than just another vendor. 

 

The Customer Success Dashboard

 

The customer success dashboard is designed to give you a snapshot of your client's health along with your company's opportunities and level of effort for servicing your clients.  The dashboard components are designed to bring together the necessary components for measuring true customer success.  

 

The dashboard contains several components to give you the analysis tools to help you measure your customer's health as well as insights into the overall health of your business.  

 

With charts and graphs that drill down into the data, along with filtering options that allow you to see your client relationships from every angle. Customer Success will enable you to identify your strengths and weaknesses.   You can also track and identify the potential for churn.  Find more opportunities with your current client base and strengthen relationships with better communication strategies.   This document will cover the elements of the dashboard and link you to articles to show you how to configure the Customer Success platform to your business model.  

 

 

Dashboard Elements

The dashboard is made up of six elements.  This section will dive into these elements, and configuration options as well as link you to the instructions you need to configure these data points within the Customer Success platform

 

Segmenting

 

Health Scoring Graphs

 

Stack Alignment Graphs

 

Stack Opportunity Chart

 

Filtering

 

Segmenting

The segmenting element is used to rate your clients based on a set of determining factors to understand the value of the client to your business, as well as the level of effort needed to service your clients.  This will provide you the insights needed to rate your clients based on how often you should communicate with them, and which clients have a high-risk rate for churn

 

 

The Customer Segment chart measures value on the horizontal axis and effort on the vertical axis.  This gives your four areas that your clients will fall into based on these metrics.   The colors of the plot marks represent the client's health scores. 

 

High Value/Low effort. - These clients are your most profitable clients.

 

High Value/High Effort - Clients you may need to meet with most often.   What do you do with a high-value client with a low health score?  Can we bring them into our stack alignment to reduce effort (opportunity identified)

Low Value/Low Effort - no communication = churn.

Low Value/High Effort - Identifies potential clients that may need to be charged more, or service times need to be reduced i.e. better stack alignment.  Help you to work toward a communication strategy to understand the resistance and for your clients to understand your value.

 

Client Health - The colors of the plots on the segment chart represent the health score of the client.   This health score is based on metrics that you configure for each client.   Effort metrics are also configured for each client.

 

There is great value in identifying a high-value customer with a red health score.  This could alert you to communicate with your client to correct issues to protect the client and your relationship with that client.

 

Click here for instructions for health metrics

Click here for instructions for effort metrics

Click here for instructions for configuring customer segment data

 

The Customer Segments chart has several features and options that help you gain insight into the client value and effort scores.  

 

Click the gear icon at the upper right of the chart to see the view options for the Customer Segments chart

 


 

 

 

 

Render by Value or Value Per Seat switch - Changes the graph value setting between the total MRR value and the per-seat MRR value of the client.   The default setting is Render by Value.

 

Size by relative number of employees - sizes the colored client plots on the segment chart based on the number of employees compared to the average number of employees for all of your clients

 

 

 

Applying filters to the dashboard settings will affect the appearance of the chart and the companies that are plotted.  See the filtering section below for these options.  

 

 

Health Scoring Graphs

The health scoring graphs give you an overall picture of your client's health scores and the opportunities identified by health.

Health scores are determined by the scoring metrics you set up in the platform.  These can be based on CSAT scores, Sentiment, assessment scores etc.  

 

Click here for instructions on health metrics

Click here for instructions on effort metrics

Click here for instructions on creating your stack

Click here for instructions on customer stack alignment and opportunities

 

 

The health charts shown on the dashboard reflect the health scores of all companies filtered as a percentage of all companies selected.  

For example, the chart below shows 36% of the satisfactory score on the graph.  This means that 36% of all clients filtered are carrying a satisfactory health score.  The inner circle of the doughnut graph will populate with the number of clients that fall under the particular status you are hovering over.

 

 

The Opportunity by Health graph shows the total opportunity available by filtered clients by health score.  

For example, the chart below is showing 10.1%- $3.5k for the 'Needs attention' graph slice.  This means 10.1% of opportunity dollars apply to clients that have a Needs Attention health score. 

 

 

Stack by Customer Chart

This chart is designed to give you an overview of where your top 10 clients line up against your stack, their current MRR value as well as opportunities available.  

 

The Top 10 graph charts the MRR and NRR opportunity, the current MRR and NRR, as well as the stack alignment percentage to give you a quick insight into the overall status of client alignment.  Better stack alignment can mean better MRR with less effort.  

 

Applying filters to the dashboard settings will affect the appearance of the chart and the companies that are plotted.  See the filtering section below for these options.  

 

Using these filters will give you even more insights into the opportunities available.  You can couple this information with the stack opportunity chart covered in the next section to identify possible sticking points aligning to specific products within your stack and address those issues and ultimately capture those opportunities

 

Click here for instructions for stack alignment configuration

Click here for instructions on customer stack alignment and opportunities

 

 

 

Hover your mouse over a client's graph points to see the details of the data.

 

 

Below the chart are the total opportunities for the companies listed in the top 10 opportunity chart.  Also listed is the total opportunity for the most recent company selected from the company selector (shown in the customer detail window)

 

 

 

Hovering your mouse over the tile will show the breakdown of the opportunities between MRR and NRR

 

 

 

Stack Opportunity

This doughnut graph shows the current stack opportunities available for the current filters applied.

This allows you to quickly see what opportunities are available for you and your clients by product type.  Combine this graph with product filtering or account manager/group filtering to gain insights into which opportunities are marketable to specific client groups.  Track your account manager teams stack alignment efforts to see who is on target.  

 

This shows all stack items that are marked as applicable for the clients filtered.  

The stack items shown around the outer hub or the graph are grouped on the inner hub of the graph by tags you have created. 

 

 

Hovering over the items or tags in the graph will show the amount of opportunity recognized and the percentage show what that opportunity contributes toward the total opportunity amount.  

For example, in the graph below, switches are called and show a $5000 opportunity, comprising 49.5% of the total opportunity dollars recognized for the tag that it is grouped within the chart.  

Stack items that carry multiple tags such as both a standard and a premium tag are shown in the graph twice, once for each tag.  Both tags will reflect the opportunity dollars recognized but the percentages will differ due to their differing percentages of total opportunity dollars represented for each tag will vary.  

 

 

Stack Alignment Graph

The stack alignment graph shows the top 10 products in your stack and graphs the current MRR, MRR Opportunity, NRR Opportunity, and the percentage of clients aligned to the item in the stack. This will give you insights into sales strategies, communication strategies, and product pricing.  

 

In the sample below roughly 25% of clients are currently aligned to our web filtering stack.  Knowing this you may want to either offer a discount on a product, initiate a communication plan around web risks, or direct account managers to try to have more discussions with clients regarding their current web filtering platform or plans.  This will help you harvest new opportunities. 

 

On the opposite side of the spectrum, if all clients use your cloud service product, but only a few are using email monitoring you may want to strategize a marketing campaign around email security risks, rather than communicate cloud services ads to clients.

 

 

 

 

Filtering

Every element of the dashboard becomes a more powerful tool when you add in the filtering component.  

This component will allow you to see all of the elements on the dashboard for a specific dataset.  

You can filter for a specific company or companies, by health scores, Account Managers, account groups, or by customer segments.

 

Review data with account managers or account groups to evaluate performance and set sales goals

Recognize possible log jams for bringing on new business due to high-effort clients

Plan and strategize workload balancing and recommendations based on health scores and stack alignment metrics of a specific client base

Find the resistance and show the value of products for high-effort customers to reduce those servicing costs.

 

These are just a sample of the insights that filtering the dashboard elements will bring to you to help you have more successful clients and operate a more successful business.

 

Once a filter is applied the dashboard will refresh the data for all elements of the dashboard.  

To apply a filter, click the filter icon located in the upper-right corner of the dashboard.  

 

The filter ribbon will be displayed.  Use the drop-down menus to select your filters.  

The filter icon will now display as green, and the number of filters applied will also show.

 

 

Use the clear filters button to remove any filters.

 

 

You can hide the filter ribbon by clicking the filter icon.  This will not remove your filters.  Applied filters will be shown next to the filter icon and can be viewed by hovering over the shown filters.