Customer usage is lying to you | Adrian Ruiz | TDSU Ep. 39

(0:07 - 0:43)

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

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, Lifers? And Adrian's here. Adrian, do you want to compete with what JP just said? Do you want to say hi in your own special way? Hi, everybody! All right, I like it. Dr. Nick.

(0:43 - 0:54)

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Adrian, why don't you introduce yourself? Yeah, appreciate it.

So my name is Adrian. I'm a pretty fresh customer success manager with about two years of experience. I'm pretty excited to join everybody today.

(0:55 - 1:07)

Love it. Excited to have you here, Adrian. You know the deal.

We're going to ask you one single question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Great question. The one thing that keeps me up at night is account health.

(1:08 - 1:45)

It's one of those things where we want to make sure that everyone's happy, but what point do we worry too much about it? Well, that's when you make every account color is yellow. And we just kind of try to stop worrying about it. Right? Cold play.

Cold play strategy. Yeah, that's definitely what is on my mind. Because as someone who's brand new to the field, how do I tackle that? What is account health? Do I measure that if the admins are happy or if their customer base is happy? Like, where does that metric come from, really? Yeah, so I want to dance around any potential judgment for how it's being done for you today.

(1:45 - 2:05)

Because I don't even know if that really matters, right? I think it's always a work in progress. What do you think the components are that make a health score or an account health rating worth paying attention to? Great question. In my opinion, one of those factors is obviously how the champion is treating it over at your customer's base.

(2:06 - 2:29)

But of course, it's going to be everyone that falls under them as well. It's going to be who are those product experts that aren't the champion that are really working with the product consistently? How do we make sure, especially in my opinion, that they are having a good experience go through? Because maybe the champion could say, hey, I love your software, but the ones that are working in it could be having a little bit more of a challenge. So that's really where I try to find out the minutiae, what their challenges are, their pain points are.

(2:29 - 2:49)

Can I push you a little bit on what that means? Is it qualitative? Is it quantitative? What do you think it looks like and what are the numbers you can see in the matrix that you're like, oh, we're in a good place? We're in a terrible place. We're somewhere in the middle. Yeah, great question.

(2:49 - 3:24)

And that's going to be the stickiness of the product, in my opinion. How often are folks logging in? How often are they using it? How well do they understand our product to know that those features that they're looking for are accessible? So typically, what I look for in those specific metrics is what's their process? Are they using the platform to the maximum of its abilities? Are they using all of the data points that they can track? But essentially, the point that I'm trying to highlight is, are they making full use of what we have to offer? Or are they making their own jobs a little bit harder by not? JP, tell me a little bit about the way you look at this from your role. First of all, I just got a great new product idea.

(3:24 - 3:38)

It's called the Sticky Meter. We're going to be measuring exactly how sticky we are. How do we measure sticky? Wouldn't that be like one of the greatest things you could have? Because since I started in CS, that's one of those things, right? We want our product to be sticky.

(3:39 - 3:47)

I like to think sort of the value pipeline. And so speaking of sticky, sticky is good. Getting stuck is not.

(3:48 - 4:26)

So what I say by that is you have a champion. And the champion using whatever the product is one level, they can see all the value they want. But if the value pipeline stops there, and there's a disconnect between what the champion sees as the value and whoever the person is that signs off on the budget sees as the value, then no matter how healthy that person is or appears to be, this is where we can sometimes get that surprise churn, right? It's like a churn reveal, right? Customer success, you got a baby, you reveal, oh, it's churn.

(4:26 - 4:58)

And it should be like a lot more transparent, right? So I think we got to keep that pipeline open. And I think that's why I know, for example, one of the strategies we've been trying to make sure we're implementing is making sure that we're not just talking with the champion, but who is also signing off and making sure that there's an alignment on the values continuing. Because part of my job may be helping that champion show the value to whoever's signing off so that we can get the renewal.

(4:59 - 5:06)

Rob, Adrian, either one of you. I can comment on that. First of all, Adrian, let me start by saying you're not giving yourself enough credit.

(5:06 - 5:36)

If I've worked with this guy, Adrian, at two different jobs, Adrian has a great pulse on customer health. But that said- Yeah, but you know what? I want to challenge that, Rob, because that's- You want to challenge that Adrian is great? Oh, no, this concept of he's got a great pulse. Because if I'm Adrian, I'm like, yeah, but when it hits the fan and I tell you, oh, I think things are in a good place, that is not going to be good enough.

(5:36 - 5:49)

We're going to have to talk numbers and trends and history. I love that, and I think that's great for Adrian, but I totally understand where you're coming from, Adrian. This can't just be written in the sand.

(5:49 - 6:05)

We got to chisel it in stone. So I'm going to elaborate on that, if that's cool. What I was going to say, actually, if you look at the history of the companies that Adrian and I worked at together, two different companies, and we didn't use health scores, formal conglomerated health scores at either company.

(6:06 - 6:18)

Why? The last one, we went strictly off of usage data and engagement data. We found that was the most important thing we could think about. The one prior to that, we were just getting our butts kicked all the time.

(6:18 - 6:27)

We weren't thinking very proactively about client health. But yeah, obviously, health scores are very multifaceted. They're very multi-threaded, as Adrian was pointing out, different parts of the organization.

(6:27 - 6:38)

And I think about this quote that the CEO of Vitality said, Jamie Davidson, smart guy. He said, he was like, imagine you go to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, you're 80% healthy. You're fine.

(6:38 - 6:47)

You're green. You're good to go. You'd be like, what? What is the 20%? You'd freak out, right? So actually, I'm thinking through a thought experiment here.

(6:47 - 6:58)

Take two customers, both 80% healthy, let's say. One is higher usage, lower satisfaction. One is higher satisfaction and lower usage.

(6:58 - 7:05)

Which of those do you think is healthier? It's a question for the group. No one has to answer that specifically. That's a good question.

(7:05 - 7:18)

I'm just going to take a stab at that one. I would say the one with the higher usage rate, because the more they use their product, even if they're running to frustrations, that's something you can address at least. If they're already happy with the product and don't use it, that sounds like a big problem.

(7:18 - 7:24)

Sticky needed question. I need context, baby. I don't think they're not using it.

(7:24 - 7:52)

Their usage is just lower. This is a challenge I came across in the last role I had, which was we started to see usage go down, but it was because the whole point of our product was to make their processes more efficient, to do a lot of the work for them. The time logged in the software, I don't believe anymore in the world we live in.

(7:52 - 7:56)

This isn't Facebook. It's not Instagram. We're not in the attention economy.

(7:56 - 8:18)

We're actually in the exact opposite. How does this slot in and help their daily activities without monopolizing their time? So in that way, usage becomes... Usage in terms of time on page, horrible metric. Usage in terms of how many widgets do they process through your software, great metric.

(8:18 - 8:29)

But those are two very different. And we often stop at the first one because it's super easy to do and never try the second one. AKA, that's context.

(8:30 - 8:47)

The usage, you need to have context, right? Higher or lower usage. What kind of product are we dealing with? It could really make a lot of sense for something, for one thing, and maybe not as much for a different one. It could also depend on the customer too and what their need is.

(8:47 - 8:49)

And the persona. That's the magic word. Yeah.

(8:49 - 9:15)

I think also you brought up a really good point, Dillon, about stopping at a certain data point and not looking further. I feel like that's a big thing that a lot of people do is we find one answer and we think that's the full picture. But as you mentioned there, there's way more to that story because there's way more than just one feature to your product, right? So I think that you brought up a really good point that goes back to how are we really tracking this? Are we really looking at the data the right way? And at that point, it's more of a procedural question, in my opinion.

(9:15 - 9:18)

But again, I really do agree with your points. Really like that. Yeah.

(9:19 - 9:26)

Adrian, let's stop it there because otherwise we're going to go down the rabbit hole of which metrics we love the most. But I love this topic. I think it's a fantastic one.

(9:27 - 9:47)

Thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights, especially for being a relatively young customer success professional. Part of what we're trying to do here is make sure that everybody's opinions get heard, understand this as a safe space and a town square of sorts where we can all sort of trade ideas and learn from one another. So I really love that.

(9:47 - 9:51)

Thanks so much, Adrian. Until next time, we'll have to say goodbye for now. Awesome.

(9:52 - 10:04)

Thank you guys for having me and I appreciate the invitation. Thank you. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value.

(10:04 - 10:30)

Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

(10:33 - 10:39)

Hey folks, it's Dillon here. Thank you for tuning in as always. Now I've got a favor to ask of you.

(10:40 - 10:54)

If you've made it this far, hopefully it means you like what we're doing with our program. So I'm asking you to please give this a like and a follow or a subscribe and leave a comment too. Your likes and your follows and your subscriptions, they allow us to keep doing what we're doing and reach a larger audience.

(10:54 - 11:03)

Your comments help us make sure that we're making the best content for you. Best of all, it's free besides a few moments of your time. Thank you again for following along and we'll see you next time.