While every company, small and large, everywhere in the world, operates and supports its business on a set of processes, the processes themselves are the product of something else. What do I mean by this? The processes are the product of projects, which are – essentially – timelines of the required human effort and of the specific milestones that are expected to be achieved. The concept of a project is the best representation within the world of business of what it means for an individual to carry out work and contribute to the advancement of a company’s strategy. A project is different than a process, which is simply a mechanical repetition of something to produce the same result each time. Projects, on the other hand, are reliant on humans and are therefore more variable in terms of execution. Because of their vulnerability to ever-changing conditions and expectations, they occasionally need to be modified...

In theory, all projects that are conducted within a business should align with the overarching business strategy. Alignment is how a company ensures that the work being performed by employees is in service to the strategy. And while it might seem abstract to employees, good leaders will be able to describe to their teams how everything they do supports the corporate strategy. It was way back in 1997 that the late, great Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, talked about corporate strategy (https://hbr.org/1997/11/making-strategy-learning-by-doing):

The strategy must mirror the realities of the company’s environment, and the resource allocation process must mirror the strategy.

Getting that mirroring right is a tricky thing. Companies that find themselves out of alignment with this mirroring can very quickly stumble and lose customers and even succumb to competitive threats because they might be perceived as being inconsistent...

For a strategy to be effectively and completely carried out, there must be understanding and an acknowledgment that different components of an organization require different types of motivation. Teams of people should be motivated to nurture the sense that the outcomes will be more powerful through a combination of the energy of individuals. The individual people that comprise the teams should be motivated differently as a way to objectively observe, coach, and measure the performance of each person.

One of the goals of leadership is to strike a balance between encouraging and nurturing the basic human desire to achieve success and the truth that ultimate success for the company comes mainly through combining and channeling the energy of many highly performing people toward the achievement of group goals. In other words, the strength of many is greater than the simple sum of individual parts. If the two types of motivation support the same...

Since the mission of CS is to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes through the vendor’s products and services, it’s logical that the most important metrics it should focus on are those that show how well the organization is performing in pursuit of that mission. What underpins that mission is effective customer engagement by the CS organization and there are ways to measure the breadth and depth of that expression.

To do that, we will take the discussion about team and individual goals and dig into the details of how those complementary categories play out in a typical CS organization.

But first, it’s important to know that there are two types of metrics: quantitative and qualitative. Second, it should not come as a surprise to hear us say that it would be nearly impossible to monitor these metrics without the assistance of a tool. Whether it’s a dashboard in Microsoft Excel or a dashboard in one of the...

We listed customer lifetime value or CLTV as an item in the Quantitative metrics – where evidence emerges section, but we feel it deserves a separate discussion because of what it should represent to forward-leaning companies. Because subscription businesses are completely reliant on recurring revenue – since profits aren’t realized until customers renew their subscriptions at least once – within companies, there should be an intense focus on understanding and executing strategies to ensure all customers stay through many renewal cycles. It’s revenue growth that is rewarded by investors and what drives up a company’s valuation in the market.

So, CLTV should be considered as more than a metric like any other that the CS organization tracks. Because of its nature as a long-term information source, it could even be seen as a proxy for the state of health of the company, a company that is attractive to investors because...

At this point, you should have an appreciation for the importance of two things. First, you should understand how important it is to track a number of key quantitative and qualitative metrics, which together should form a comprehensive view of customer engagement from a CS point of view. Second, you should understand how critical it is to your company’s business and to its customers that effort be made to continually optimize these key metrics your CS organization focuses on. In the world of CS, there should be no room for set it and forget it when it comes to metrics. The world beyond CS doesn’t even work that way. To build a reporting system and imagine it doesn’t require ongoing maintenance is to be willfully blind to the reality that your company’s business continues to change and adapt to the customer community – it changes because it reacts to and anticipates shifts in the market, as well as due to shifts in strategy that are determined...