Chapter 8 Customer Experience and Success: Both Science and Art Once the improvements have been implemented, revisit the journey map to see what’s changed and identify the next set of priorities. If it hasn’t become evident, you’ve at least developed a framework that helps everyone understand the complete customer journey, not just what’s happening in his or her specific area. It should be treated as a living document, evolving as your business grows. Taking a half day to establish this big-picture thinking will reap endless rewards. 3. Be Metric-Oriented Pick a metric, any metric: EBITA, CAC, LTV, NPS, churn, revenue, virality, conversion, customer satisfaction, and more. There is seemingly no limit to the metrics that a startup could, should, or must track. So, where should you focus? Even with just a handful of customers, it’s important to establish a core set of customer success operational metrics to monitor. While these will change over time, being metric- oriented around customer success early provides several benefits. First, it reinforces a data-driven mindset with employees and communicates data-driven decision-making as a core value. This will be a game changer down the road and help you avoid measuring the wrong things — or at least help you avoid measuring the wrong things for too long. Second, it helps minimize subjectivity often associated with early customer success operations, and it provides a stronger foundation for performance management discussions and operational adjustments. Third, it establishes a database of historical metrics, albeit perhaps rudimentary, that can provide insights and inform adjustments over time. Customer success metrics in the early days at Salesforce were a combination of activity-oriented metrics, some educated guessing, and an attitude of, “Let’s try this and see what the impact is.” CSMs were assigned a set of accounts within the territory they supported, we each had a customer dashboard to monitor usage and activities, and we were given targets for proactive/reactive outreach. Account executives owned the renewal and all upsell and cross-sell opportunities. CSMs uncovered many of those opportunities, and eventually we evolved CSM compensation to include not just activities, but also the identification of revenue-generating new opportunities.