Measuring customer happiness without data | Jim Jones | TDSU Ep. 31

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Another way to analogize the product is, let's say you're building a house. Ours is effectively the Cat5 cable that you string from room to room so you have ethernet connections. That analogy helped me, Zero.

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I know a little about that. Guys ready? What's up, Lifers? And welcome to the Daily Stand Up with Lifetime Value where we're giving you fresh, new ideas in the customer success and the CS adjacent spaces every single day. I've got my man, Rob here.

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Rob, you wanna say hi? What's up, Fanatics? JP, do you wanna say hi? What's up, Bleepers? Jim, do you wanna say hi? Hello to my people. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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Jim, do you wanna introduce yourself a little bit? Yeah, sure. My name is Jim Jones. I'm the director of customer success at a California-based software company called Realtime Innovations.

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And we make a technology that helps power autonomous vehicles and connected medical devices. Whoa, that was... I wasn't expecting both of those to be in the same sentence. That's interesting.

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So I wanna hear more about that. I'm hoping we can loop that into your topic here, but you know what the deal is here. We ask one single question to every one of our guests that joins us.

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Jim, we wanna know what's on your mind when it comes to customer success. Yeah, there are several things, but the main thing that's on my mind is we are not a SaaS company and we have no telemetry in our product. It's next to impossible for us to determine things like product usage, unless the customer tells us.

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Are they using this component of the product? Are they using that one? Are they using it at all? Who logs in or who uses it? So the question is, a lot of health scores are based on usage metrics. How would you suggest building a customer health score if you don't have those available? Oh boy, well, that's interesting. So no telemetry, because I guess maybe I'd like to understand how your product works, because I feel like just naturally self-driving has more telemetry than just about anything out there.

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So tell me a little bit about where the separation is there. So it's a great question. And just very briefly, our software is a set of libraries that performs a certain function that has to deal with communications within a device.

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And we are actually within the application code that the customer creates. So you can essentially think of what we distribute as a set of compiled and linked libraries for the propeller heads of the audience. But it is not, is it a subscription-based model? Or do you sell it one time? It's subscription-based.

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And I guess that's because you are constantly sending updates to those libraries, like optimizing or adding on to it. Is that the way it works? No, in fact, just the opposite, because the industries that we're in, customers want a stable platform that is a known quantity that they can test. So updates to the software are available via our website for download, et cetera, but the customer controls when they put those updates on.

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So just to be clear, we are not connected to our customers or our users' environments or their machines or whatever. Exactly, yeah. Security issues.

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Because, exactly, because we also work in a lot of restricted industries. Yeah, well, and the stability, right? Like you don't want any opportunity for, well, I'm frigging stumped, Jim. So I'm gonna hand this over to Simone.

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I guess one thing you can measure is the downloads, how often they're downloading and the frequency of that. But that's just a single data point, and it doesn't feed anything in terms of like the level of success they're having. I mean, they could download it, put it in and hate what it does.

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It'd be really difficult for you to read into that. I guess, man, JP and Rob, I don't know which one of you wants to go first, walk into this wall of fire. And before you do that, sorry, let me maybe just phrase the question in a different way that might be easier to answer.

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So if you are building a health score, what would you add to it in addition to customer usage metrics, if you have them? Let's take that out of the equation. What's the rest of your health score? Our customers open to the good old fashioned hopping on the call. I mean, to talk with them.

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It's not as scalable as data is, of course, because you have to talk with everyone and there's some subjectivity. But I mean, if people are buying, like there has to be something, right? Is your product say available in a capacity where people can review it? Or they can't do that either? Like G2 or something, where you can see the reviews or no? No, not really. Another way to analogize the product is, let's say you're building a house.

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Ours is effectively the Cat5 cable that you string from room to room so you have ethernet connections. That analogy helped me zero. I know a little about that.

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And JP, what you said sparked a thought, which at my advanced stage has escaped me. So I'm sure it'll come back to me. Well, that happened to me too.

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And I'm not even at an advanced stage. So it's all right. What are you talking about happened to you? Sorry.

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Hey, there it is. The first one. Let's get a counter going for dad jokes.

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We had one off camera, so I'll call this two. But Rob, I want to get your opinion on all of this. Yeah, no, it's a great question.

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Jim, I really appreciate that you brought a workshop to the table, which is kind of cool. You're bringing to us what is one of the most challenging things. It's not an opinion you're trying to share with the world and force into the industry.

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It's a conversation and a good thought experiment. I was thinking through it. As I was thinking through it, I realized what we're discussing here is arguably not a new problem, which is kind of interesting.

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If you think about Henry Ford selling the first Model Ts, there's no product telemetry there, right? There's no usage data. But there were other things that could tell Henry Ford whether customers were healthy and using the product. First, I just want to ask a question.

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Is your goal more through the lens of client retention and return business? Is it referrals? Is it expansion? What would you say your goal of the health score is? It's a great question. So two parts, first of all, retention, and second of all, opportunities for expansion. Again, a lot of our customers are in kind of restricted industries.

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So we get, just by their nature, we get very little in the way of references. Hmm, interesting. Do the industry restrictions also prevent you from direct communication with the users about how satisfied they were with their purchase? That's what it was.

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And you just reminded me, and this goes back to the question that JP asked. Yes, the short answer is we can reach out to the contacts. Obviously, it's up to them whether they engage with us or not.

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But we do have somewhat of an idea of what parts of the product are being used, what are not. That's more in the aggregate for all of our customers. I don't have enough data points for any individual customer.

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Plus, it's not a regular data feed that you would get. Yeah, I think you're sort of limited to, on the usage side, just use what you have, which, if aggregate data is all you have, that's all you have. If there's no way to track that code further.

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Sorry, go ahead. And no, I was just gonna say, I've sort of given up on the idea of including any usage component in our health score. So, what are other things that you would typically measure that a healthy customer does? I'm happy to speak to that.

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I'm sure Dillon and JP have thoughts, too. So, if I think of the signals of a happy customer, if I paint a mental picture of what is a happy customer, obviously, it varies a bit from company to company, but at the end of the day, that customer is happy. So, what is your measure of their sentiment? That customer is potentially referring their friends and colleagues.

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So, is there a way that you can track referrals? That's always a good question. Maybe that customer's so excited or so upset that they're posting reviews, like JP said. That customer's probably moving at a pace that they like, which is usually pretty quick.

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So, you might measure time to launch the product. For the customer, I don't know what that time to launch might look like for you, and the time it takes for them to see value in the product, which is a bit more amorphous. But basically, what I'm saying here is, I think you have to fall back on a lot of the sentiment scores, time to launch metrics, and then arguably support cases, too, although that cuts many different ways.

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But yeah, I'm curious to get the thoughts from the group on what else you'd include in a health score. So, I think there's a way to extrapolate information from the number of calls you have and how often you're speaking to them, how often you're engaging them. That, in and of itself, you might just have a customer who agrees to all these calls but is not enjoying them.

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But another piece might be, how often they're proactively reaching out to you. That's one thing. These are all super hard to measure, I understand that, but we're already trying to climb Mount Everest, so we might as well just swing for the fences here.

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Whether they are ever canceling without advance notice, whether your emails are going unanswered by them or within a certain time frame, and there's probably a layer of AI, everybody's favorite term, to apply to that of what's the average that it takes for a customer to reply and things like that. I think there are ways to understand how they are viewing the relationship that aren't specifically, hey, are you happy? Red, yellow, green, some of the more, if you're in a marriage or a relationship, you start to read those signals without having to ask, and you're supposed to. And so it's a lot of the same thing.

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What are the signals? I know that's what we're getting at, so I'm kind of using the word and the definition, but that's where my mind starts to go with a challenge like this. JP, with the time we have left, what do you think? I think that what everyone said was really great. This was a really great conversation and definitely one that we'll have to noodle on some more, but I think I gotta put some more water in the pot.

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Hey. Well, and you guys have given me some stuff to think about too, in terms of sentiment and all that. So I get it, it's a workshop type question, but appreciate the answers pointing me in some good directions.

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No, super cool. That's our time. So I wanna thank you again for bringing a very unique question.

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So really appreciate that. Love anybody who's thinking outside the box and making us work. So thanks again, Jim.

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Until next time, we're gonna have to say goodbye. All right, bye. Thanks, guys.

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Thanks, Jim. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. 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.

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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 LifetimeValue.com. That's at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time. Hey, folks, it's Dillon here.

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