Edit: An excerpt from this post was included in this excellent article from Databox: The 15 Most Important Customer Success Metrics for SaaS Companies.
While the typical Customer Success metrics like churn, renewals, CLTV and retention are important to track, they are all lagging indicators. This means they are a reflection of your work, and your customers’ activity, after it happens.
If you are doing the right things to make your customers successful, these financial metrics will eventually reflect your hard work and start moving in a positive direction. For that reason, we keep a close eye on some more fundamental, day-to-day, activity-based metrics. One of these, and the most important, is the number of escalations received from our Support team.
At Linode, we have a world-class Support organization available to our customers 24/7/365. This team is highly trained and empowered to fix almost any problem that arises with our platform. Server down for maintenance? No problem. Website unavailable? They’ve got your back.
With such an excellent team handling most of the day-to-day customer interactions, if we get an escalation from them, we know something has either gone horribly wrong or wonderfully right. That’s why we track both negative (trouble) and positive (opportunity) escalations to Customer Success.
On the negative side, if we receive an escalation about an issue that is beyond Support’s ability to fix, it’s a good indication of a systemic issue with our product or a feature that needs to be added, potentially affecting many customers. Do we need to rally additional resources and teams (Product Development, Engineering, etc.) to work on a solution? A “trouble” escalation might also act as an early warning of a customer about to churn, and gives our team a heads-up so we can step in for the save.
On the more positive side, an escalation from Support may be a great opportunity. Is a new customer growing quickly? Are they interested in a longer-term contract or a case study, both of which our team coordinates? Great! We’ll get the ball rolling. An escalation of this type lets the Customer Success team step in at an important part in the customer’s lifecycle, helping to steer them in the right direction and clear any obstacles to future growth.
In short, whether good or bad, an escalation to Customer Success tells us that something out of the ordinary is happening. These are critical points in the customer lifecycle, and present opportunities for our team to positively influence our customers’ experiences at Linode. In doing so, we see retention, growth, and other metrics improve across the board.