Boosting Customer Success with Strategic OKRs

The client can sign the deal and undergo onboarding, but never realize value from it.

That is why customer success is more than just customer satisfaction. One needs to do much more than simply push adoption, solve problems, make customers succeed, and ensure renewals and growth.

As Salesforce found out, 88% of customers become more interested in purchasing again if they are satisfied. And that is why it is important to measure if customer success programs have brought any value.

Customer success OKRs can help coordinate the efforts to deliver such results as faster implementation, increased adoption, better customer health, and higher retention rates. 

Why Use OKRs for Customer Success Teams?

Onboarding, adoption, support, renewals, and growth initiatives are carried out by customer success teams. However, increased activities do not translate to increased value for the customer.

The OKR approach shifts the emphasis from monitoring activities such as meetings and training to outcomes such as reduced time to implement, greater adoption of the product, improved customer health, and retention.

Objective: Help new customers get value faster.

Key Results:

• Cut implementation time down from 45 to 30 days.
• Grow the number of customers who complete onboarding in 14 days from 60% to 85%.
• Raise the percentage of customers with 30-day product adoption from 55% to 75%.
• Boost the score for onboarding experience from 7.8 to 9.0.

In this way, the Objective shows the direction while the Key Results determine whether the outcome was accomplished.

Meeting Challenges Using Customer Success OKRs

Transitioning From Reactive To Proactive Customer Management

Customer success teams have the tendency to become reactive. Their time is spent dealing with escalations, customer needs, open tickets, and sudden renewal threats.

Customer success OKRs motivate the sales teams to set up proactive outcomes like early product adoption, spotting at-risk customers, or developing recovery strategies for unhealthy accounts.

As opposed to waiting for a customer to start disengaging, the team starts monitoring the indicators that lead to disengagement.

Defining customer success as a shared concept

Various teams might have their own view of customer success.

Customer success can be viewed by sales as revenue from expansion. For support, it can mean resolution speed. For product teams, it can mean product use, whereas for customer success managers, it means satisfaction and relationships.

OKRs bring all these views into one by setting common goals.

A customer is successful if he adopts the product, achieve the desired outcome, stay engaged, get proper support, and decide to keep the relationship going.

Aligning Customer Outcomes with Business Outcomes

Customer success needs to provide value to both customers and the organization.

Setting just a renewal target could make the team think about contract values more than providing value to the customer. Conversely, measuring customer satisfaction without linking it to retention could fail to indicate if the relationship is commercially viable.

Successful customer success OKRs should take care of both perspectives. Some of these OKRs could be customer outcomes like time to value, adoption, satisfaction, and outcome attainment, as well as business outcomes like retention, renewal, and expansion revenue.

Identifying Customer Risks Earlier

Churn is seldom the result of the customer explicitly stating that they do not want to renew.

The early indicators are typically seen in declining usage, poor onboarding, unresolved problems, a lack of stakeholder involvement, or disengagement.

OKRs help identify these indicators before renewal.

For instance, rather than OKR tracking renewal rates, a team can raise the percentage of at-risk customers having a formal recovery plan within five business days.

Activities focus reduction

Customer success departments tend to monitor calls, e-mails, meetings, trainings, and business reviews.

Such data will provide information on load for management, but such metrics won’t confirm that there is value delivered for customers.

Training 100 people will be considered an activity. Boosting active feature usage from 50% to 75% – an outcome.

The best OKRs should measure outcomes achieved due to the efforts of the team.

Coordinating customer journey

Customer experience will be affected by sales, implementation, customer success, support, product, finance, and operations.

If these departments operate on different priorities, then there will be delays in the process, repetition of communication, and lack of clear responsibility.

In order for dependencies to become visible, aligned OKRs can be helpful. It is the customer success team that owns the adoption objective, the product department helps by improving the usability, and the support department helps by eliminating repetitive issues.

The following step is the creation of OKRs reflecting the team’s priorities.

OKRs for Customer Success

My recommendation is to start with the customer journey before writing the OKRs.

Analyze the experiences of the customer from signing of the contract to onboarding, adoption, realization of value, renewals, and expansion. And then find out where the gaps are.

Begin with Customer and Business Needs

Customer Success OKR priorities need to align with the overall business objective. In case of retention, emphasize customer well-being and renewals. In case of a new market, emphasize implementation and adoption.

Set the Baseline First

Before you set your goals, you should assess the baseline for these metrics: retention, revenue retention, time to value, adoption rate, onboarding completion, satisfaction rate, resolution time, renewals, and expansion.

Choose Relevant Objectives

Choose three to five Objectives each quarter, focusing on areas that you can make a significant impact on in relation to customer experience OKRs through implementation, adoption, customer health, renewals, or team capability.

Use Leading and Lagging Indicators

Retention rate, churn rate, renewals, and expansion rate are some examples of lagging indicators, while some examples of leading indicators are adoption, onboarding effectiveness, customer health, and customer engagement.

Ensure Each Key Result Is Quantifiable

Each Key Result must have a metric, baseline, target, and deadline.

Rather than: Enhance customer onboarding process.

Try: Get customer onboarding within 30 days from 65% to 85% this quarter.

Select the best metrics for your customer service key results.

Examples of Customer Success OKRs

Below are some example OKRs which you could use, taking into consideration your customers, product, process, and current level of performance.

Product/Service Adoption

Objective: Achieve product adoption within the workflow of the customers.

Key Results:

• Increase monthly active users within customer accounts from 62% to 78%.
• Increase adoption of core product features by 22%.
• Reduce the number of licensed users inactive for 30 days from 25% to 12%.
• Increase strategic customers who have adopted four or more workflows to 65%.

In this case, the Key Results are focused on actual usage, not just access.

Customer Experience: Implementation

Objective: Improve the implementation experience of the new customers.

Key Results:

• Decrease average implementation time from 50 days to 35 days.
• Increase successful implementations delivered within the deadline from 72% to 90%.
• Increase customers with finished administrator training before launch from 65% to 92%.
• Increase implementation experience score from 8.0 to 9.0.
• Decrease implementation escalations from 18% to 8%.

Customer Experience: Expansion

Objective: Create more value for our customers using the current product.

Key Results:

• Raise the percentage of successful customer stories from 55% to 85%.
• Raise the percentage of strategic customers that have at least one tangible business result from 45% to 70%.
• Raise the percentage of customers adopting new use cases from 30% to 50%.
• Raise the percentage of executive stakeholders involved in quarterly reviews from 50% to 75%.
• Raise average customer health score from 72 to 82.

This means the focus here is on delivering more value for the customer before we sell more products to them.

Customer Experience: Growth and Renewal

Objective: Encourage higher levels of customer engagement that lead to sustained retention and growth.

Key Results:

• Grow gross revenue retention from 89% to 94%.
• Improve on-time renewals from 82% to 95%.
• Reduce preventable churn from 7% to 4%.
• Boost renewals where value review is done before 90 days of expiry by 50% to 85%.
• Expand growth opportunities from existing customers from ₹30 lakh to ₹50 lakh.

In the above OKR, we have mixed both renewal and customer success key results together.

Customer Support

Objectives: Provide reliable and timely support that builds customer trust.

Key Results:

• Decrease median first response time from four hours to one hour.
• Increase first contact resolution rate from 62% to 78%.
• Decrease average resolution time for critical support requests from 18 hours to eight hours.
• Increase customer satisfaction rate with support from 86% to 93%.
• Decrease number of support tickets that have been reopened from 12% to 6%.
• Decrease the number of support tickets related to the five most frequent issues by 30%.

These are useful, excellent customer service key results metrics because they measure speed, quality, satisfaction, and the prevention of repeated problems.

Team Performance

Objective: Create an aligned and competent team that can be successful in customer relationships.

Key Results:

• Increase the percentage of customers with an updated success plan to 90% from 58%.
• Make sure that all risky accounts have a recovery plan within five workdays and reach 95% of them.
• Reach 90% accuracy in predicting the customer renewal rate from 75%.
• Conduct two coaching sessions per month with each customer success manager.
• Raise the level of competency in customer success on the part of the team from 72% to 85%.
• Reduce the number of customers that have not been contacted in more than 30 days by 75%.

Coaching sessions will be one of the action items; nevertheless, along with competency and account metrics, they will contribute to performance development.

How JOP Can Help With Customer Success OKRs

With JOP, you can align, plan, monitor, and review your customer success OKRs in one platform.

It can help teams align their customer success objectives to the organization’s strategic goals, allocate accountability, measure the progress of Key Results, and identify risks at regular intervals using check-ins and dashboard reports.

It can further help teams move away from activities to outcomes with improved adoption, customer health, satisfaction, retention, and growth.