CSM efficiency

Matan,

I just spotted your post, but wanted to comment, as we're wrestling with similar decisions.

In my mind, the industry has two core metrics that facilitate any additional KPIs that layer on top of the specific goal.  Ultimately, efficiency relates to increasing capacity of the CSM team or program.  However, that capacity can increase scope or depth of CSM coverage.

Increasing scope of coverage relates to the time available to stretch CSM resources to engage more clients.  That position requires that we have clear expectations for the right touch points across the customer lifecycle, and we want to leverage CSM efficiency to cover more clients. 

For example, in programs where the CSM team has 4-6 touch points intended to groom an effective cross-sell or renewal cycle, a 15% improvement in efficiency enabled a CSM team to cover 200 additional clients with lifecycle engagement.  The best next KPI for that program was renewal rate and CS qualified leads, which could be related to sales revenue and the all important revenue retention rate.  I would be negligent not to use that supplemental KPI not to justify additional staffing for CSM, but the core metric related to using added efficiency for additional client coverage.

Efficiency can also produce increased depth of coverage in the lifecycle, more touch points and CTAs within the customer population covered by CSM.  For highly complex solutions or where high touch customers require personalized service, added efficiency can often best be deployed by increasing alerts and timely interventions to deepen the relationship with the business and the customer.  For example, in a business tuned to a very specialized industry or niche capability, I would want to leverage increased efficiency to add more alerts and monitors to my system and to increase the proactive engagement with clients before issues become problems.  By adding 15% more alerts and touch points within key customer populations, NPS among a desirable segment could increase, driving better adoption, retention, and reference business from that cohort.  Leadership loves the supplemental KPI results, but the core influence stems from leveraging increased efficiency for greater depth of coverage.

I hope that this information was helpful.  For us, we looked for increased depth of coverage among our most "high touch" customers, so those teams had KPI associated with that value proposition; while another team needed to stretch a proven lifecycle model to cover more customers.  We found different supplemental KPI worked, but only after we figured out the core efficiency we needed to achieve.

Mark