Benchmark at your own risk | Sarah Betts | Ep. 103

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:15)

I get this question all the time. As a consultant, people ask me all the time, what should our NPS be? And I'm like, that's such a hard question to answer, and I don't know how to tell you.

100. All the ways that it depends. It actually, yeah, yeah, right, exactly, yeah.

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:23)

Any last words, folks?

[Rob] (0:24 - 0:30)

It was nice knowing you. Seems like what you say when you ask any last words, I don't know.

[Dillon] (0:31 - 1:10)

What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I've got my man, RJaz, here with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

What's up, Lifers? Don't even explain it. Let this be a little Easter egg for people.

They'll have to Google RJaz. I hope that's not going to get in any trouble. And we have JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? Vita velorum, baby. Vita velorum.

This is off the rails already. And we have Sarah with us. Sarah, can you say hi, please?

[Sarah] (1:10 - 1:11)

Hey, folks. Good to be here.

[Dillon] (1:12 - 1:21)

Love your eyeglasses, by the way. Thank you. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Sarah, thank you so much for being here, for bringing those wonderful eyeglasses. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Sarah] (1:22 - 1:34)

Sure. I am a support leader, passionate about customer support, the actual keeping the customer's retention part of this calculation we're so excited about. Love it.

It's what I'm here for.

[Dillon] (1:35 - 1:48)

Very cool. Okay. Well, you know what our one question is, what it is we do here.

We ask one question, one question only. And that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success slash support? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Sarah] (1:49 - 2:24)

Absolutely. I love data. Love it.

I hate benchmark data. Hate it. My philosophy is if you are benchmarking and doing what everybody else is doing, you're going to get exactly the results that everybody else is getting.

And I am not here for that. I am here to excel, to win by studying the data and figuring out what works for my customers and what is making them successful with my product. I can then better optimize my support and success to make sure that I am giving them exactly what they need out of my product and keep them.

[Dillon] (2:26 - 2:32)

Does your opinion about benchmarking change if it is much more nuanced, if it is- Oh, yes.

[Sarah] (2:32 - 2:34)

... more stratified? Obviously nuance is everything.

[Dillon] (2:35 - 2:37)

Yes. Okay. Go ahead.

[Sarah] (2:37 - 4:16)

So the thing is, what I see a lot is I'm in several communities, support-driven, CI, all those things. And people come in and say, what is the right CSAT we're looking for? What is the time to response that we're looking for?

I don't know. What is your sales cycle look like? What is your renewal cycle look like?

How do people use your app? Are they in and out in five seconds, or are they living in that app all day long? The way that people utilize your product is going to inform what metrics you should be tracking.

And if I am just going off of some number that I got off the internet, it's probably going to be okay. Yeah, I'm going to increase my response time. Yeah, I might be able to look at that CSAT and finagle some other things.

But what I look at is things like when customers are in onboarding, what are the main things they're talking to me about? Okay, I'm going to take that data and I'm going to go back to product. I'm going to go back to engineering.

I'm going to go back to sales. And I'm going to say, are we missing something in the sales cycle where they're not getting the information that they need about our product? Is there something that is a basic functionality of our product?

If you're making the example I use, if you're tracking inventory and people can't figure out how to add a SKU to the product, that is a massive UX flaw. And you need to go to that team and get that fixed. So retention is a team sport and support has the data.

And so you need to look beyond just those benchmarks and be a little bit more creative, a little bit more nuanced, just informed about what you're doing and what your customers are trying to do so that you can pass accurate data around to all your coworkers, those people we work with, not silo from.

[Dillon] (4:17 - 4:24)

JP, I've got a two-parter for you. Damn. You work at a data company.

[JP] (4:25 - 4:26)

Yes, a data company, yes.

[Dillon] (4:27 - 4:37)

And so is this a conversation that you guys have internally making sure that you use your data responsibly? Or is this something that you're practicing just like within your role as a CSM?

[JP] (4:39 - 6:31)

So what I wanted to do was actually call out something that I do with my support team. I don't get a chance to do it a lot, but one of the things is our software is on-prem. So that means since it's not hosted, we actually don't have a lot of data on the customer.

So we actually, that drives a lot of the conversations we have is like, how are you using our product? And I think that we have so many different kinds of users. So even though it's one product, people are using it differently in pharma than they may in healthcare, even though those are two related fields, right?

One may be using it more for something more like business intelligence, and one may be using it more because they're trying to figure out the effectiveness of a particular drug or treatment. And so nuance is everything, context is everything. I think what I'll say, what I was going to say before about me working with the support team, one of the things I found interesting in my conversation with one of the support leaders was about once the problem has been solved, understanding, was it actually solved by something that the support team provided or did the customer end up doing it on their own?

Because so often what happens is when people resolve their problem, or sometimes even if they don't necessarily say anything, and so that thing is gone. So we work with the person to try to solve this problem, and then we get to the end. So to your point, Sarah, if we have a bunch of data on types of problems that are being solved, there's a piece missing at the end, which is, did you get confirmation of how many of these were confirmed that this was the resolution?

That's a difference than if we're making a different inference off of the numbers. So it's about five cents.

[Dillon] (6:31 - 7:05)

It feels like there's a couple of phrases that are coming to mind that I think apply, and I'm not going to explain them any further. One is trust, but verify, right? There's a ton of, I think we talk a ton about overly prescriptive advice.

And I think this benchmarking thing fits into that of like, you've really got to dig down to understand whether the advice you're getting, whether the benchmark you're looking at actually really applies to your situation. Anyway, Rob, why don't you jump in here as a person who sees tons of different data sets. Tell us what this sort of means to you and how it resonates for you.

[Rob] (7:06 - 9:22)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This comes up all the time for me, because I get the question all the time. Arjaz, not Rob, Arjaz.

Thank you. The rebrand coming along. For those who weren't here, it's because I introduced myself with my full name, including my Catholic confirmation name, Robert John Anthony Zambito.

But anyway, I get this question all the time. Because as a consultant, people ask me all the time, what should our NPS be? And I'm like, that's such a hard question to answer.

And I don't know how to tell you. A hundred. All the ways that it depends.

Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah.

You know what it reminds me of? There's a conversation I was having with one of the greatest minds of our era in customer success, a guy named Dillon Young. So Dillon and I had this conversation a couple months ago.

We were talking about time in app, like that sometimes we'll get questions like, what should my time in app be ideally? And it's like, well, that varies completely depending on your model. Because if you're, I think the examples that you use, Dillon, were like, if you're Instagram, you want all day, every day, people in app.

If you're TurboTax, the ideal state is people are barely in your app at all. Right? So that speaks to this level of nuance between different models.

I also saw this between like, there's like models, some models, usage depends on like how many tickets or how many units are in the product, versus other models. It's like models of engagement, right? How do you engage your users, which is actually different than like work units.

So there's tons of different ways to break this. And I actually think there's a certain danger with benchmarking that you called out, Sarah, which sometimes when you tell your customers they're doing really well, they actually regress. This is like a phenomenon that I've seen firsthand.

And I've also, it's true. I've studied this. I can share the example down the line, but basically if you tell people they're in the 90th percentile, you'd think that would encourage them to do better, but they like actually often regress to what's known as like the magnetic middle.

It's this phenomenon like regression to the mean that happens. So there's a certain implicit danger that you bring up. It's a great topic though.

[Dillon] (9:22 - 9:39)

It makes me very curious. Sarah, any tips you want to leave the audience with on how to maybe avoid this blind spot, anything really tactically that they could be doing to maybe niche down better on benchmarking, I think it is useful as long as you're doing it correctly.

[Sarah] (9:39 - 10:33)

Yeah. I think you definitely want to keep track of it. Use those benchmarks, the CSAT, the NPS, reply time, the time of resolution, all of those kinds of things as a metric of how your other projects are going.

You're not going to go into the inbox and say, okay, I'm going to make CSAT a hundred percent this quarter. You have to do things that affect your users that prompt them to be happy. Just like you can't just chase happiness.

You have to chase other values in your life to get to happiness. So be looking at the data, be consistently looking at the data and be talking to other people at your company. Don't just buckle down into your own little sphere.

We love our customer people, our customer success, our onboarders, our operation specialists, but we need to be talking to sales. We need to be talking to marketing. We need to be talking to the devs.

It has to be a conversation that is ongoing consistently so that you can work together and understand what the needs of your user are holistically.

[Dillon] (10:35 - 11:00)

Yeah, that was going to be the word I used, holistic. Just like never taking your foot off the pedal in terms of critical thinking. Absolutely.

We see it so often. Sarah, this is a fantastic topic. We are out of time.

I do believe we could keep going, especially once you expanded it out to just how to find happiness in your life. I'm still working on that one. My spidey senses started tingling, but for now we do have to say goodbye.

[Sarah] (11:00 - 11:02)

It's been a great joy. Thank you so much for having me.

[Voiceover] (11:32 - 11:37)

and find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.