Are you serious about Customer Success?

LISTEN

1. Do you meet with your top customers on a regular basis to get qualitative input on various aspects of your business strategy?

2. Does your understanding of customer needs inform your mar- keting and sales plays?

3. Have you established listening posts across your customers’ lifecycles?

4. Are you measuring customer perceptions of ease of doing business and your ability to effectively provide strategic ad- vice?

5. Does your analysis and reporting of customer feedback provoke action by presenting findings in a compelling way?

6. Do your team members understand what your customers are striving for in business outcomes?

7. Do you understand what business problems or opportunities your customers are solving or pursuing in implementing your solution?

8. Are you assessing customer perceptions of technical and functional project success on an ongoing basis?

9. Are you collecting customer input on solution adoption (number of loyal users)/consumption (number of solution features implemented)?

10. Are you assessing the incremental realization of business outcomes?

ENGAGE

1. Do you have an enterprise-wide process to communicate your company/solution stories consistently and appropriately at each and every stage of the customer lifecycle?

2. Are you able to tell a story to the customer CxO that would compel this officer to purchase/repurchase your solution?

3. Can you quantify the potential impact of your solution so that budget decisions can be made on a financial/economic basis?

4. Are you having periodic collaborative-solution roadmap sessions to drive new product decisions for your company?

5. Are you viewed as a thought leader in your industry?

6. Have you developed a sales and marketing strategy that focuses on retaining your customers?

7. Does product development have the ability to monitor and react to real-time customer deployment metrics?

8. Do you have the ability to predict and proactively address customer support problems?

9. Is your professional services organization considered a stra- tegic trusted advisor (versus implementation expert)?

10. Do you have the proper systems and tools in place to em- power sales, marketing, service, R&D, and support organizations with the Big Data insights available in the age of IoT/ Subscription Economy?

ENSURE

1. Do you regularly help customers improve their solution adoption (number of loyal users) rates?

2. Do you regularly help customers maximize the consumption (number of solution features implemented) of their solution?

3. Do you regularly quantify and communicate the value (e.g., ROI) you have delivered to your top 100 customers?

4. Do you provide services, tools, and programs to regularly help customers achieve the full potential value of their solution?

5. Do you capture and provide best practices and performance benchmarks of your solutions to all of your customers?

6. Do you regularly review and help customers achieve agreed- on milestones and key performance indicators?

7. Do you produce a solution-and-partnership performance dashboard that is reviewed quarterly with customer leadership?

8. Do you have a continuous adoption and value realization program (rather than being a reaction to customer requests)?

9. Do you have a mechanism (including training) to help your channel partners adopt ensuring programs?

10. Do you have a mechanism to feed the results of your ensuring program back to key functional areas (e.g., marketing for reference assets, sales for performance benchmarks/ROI tools, product development for new product prioritization)?