3. Measuring CS Impact with NPS at Whatfix
- Khadim Batti Co-founder & CEO, Whatfix
Establishing clear roles and responsibilities in customer success is critical to achieving consistent results. Role clarity can become a challenge in the company.
For example, should the responsibility of customer success be to focus on NRR (net renewal rates), GRR (gross renewal rates), or net dollar retention?
We also fumbled at the start. Initially, there was confusion, but we decided that the primary job of Customer Success is to deliver ROI to customers. Therefore, they are responsible for the GRR goal and NPS (net promoter score). Account Management and Sales handle expansion and new revenue opportunities.
Two metrics that have significantly helped us in recent years to measure the performance of customer success is NPS and CSAT.
The Support team uses CSAT to determine whether they provided the correct answer. NPS is great for getting subjective comments from detractors, people who would otherwise not give you feedback or ratings. It offers early notice to focus on these customers.
We faced several challenges when we first started using NPS.
Initially, the customer success team only sent NPS surveys to customers who were already happy or satisfied. Our NPS was 70 – 75.
When we examined the coverage, we identified issues such as many customers not going live or not responding. We even tried sending the surveys from my email account.
We shifted our focus from just tracking NPS scores to also assessing our customer coverage, ensuring we are reaching all key stakeholders covering as many accounts as possible.
When we made this change, our NPS dropped from 70 to 46, but it gave us the right feedback, and we started working on the issues, and the NPS started improving.
Currently, we have an overall NPS score of 50 with 56% coverage, compared to 2022, when coverage was around 26% with a score of 59. For 100k+ accounts, our coverage today is at 75%, with an NPS score of 73, which is a strong number. We now conduct NPS quarterly with all our customers.
It's often unclear who to target with NPS—end users, buyers, or other stakeholders. We send it to multiple recipients.
On one hand, we have implementation people on the customer side; on the other hand, we have the budget owners. We survey both of those folks, and we only include the end users in the survey if the customer allows it.
As we collected NPS data, we realized that we could get deeper insights from cohort analysis. It helps us identify patterns among different groups of stakeholders.
You can tell what the cohort of administrators is saying or considering versus, say, the budget owners. Geographic cohort analysis can provide better visibility into market-specific realities.
Regarding the correlation between metrics like NPS and Customer Success KPIs, every company has specific metrics or heuristics that evolve over time. For example, on Twitter, users who followed at least 25 people showed higher engagement.
Similarly, in our case, we realized that if a content author from the customer side creates at least nine pieces of content monthly, the likelihood of that customer’s success is likely to increase by 99% because they can then track performance improvements constantly.
Once we understood that content creation and content authors are central to delivering value for us, we added a KPI for customer success managers focused on engaging content authors.
So their job is to go back to them every couple of weeks and say, okay, you have not used these three features. You can do so much more by using them. , You could create nudges, and address points of user drop-offs.
You can always link these events and actions back to NPS or low NPS. Do the correlation between what actions lead to better performance on the NPS and what it could be attributed to. If you do proper analytics and identify those numbers, you will get more lead time to manage and address potential issues.
For those who do not have content authors, we started asking our Digital Adoption Consultants (DACs) to step in and create content. If the client lacks resources, we started offering content creation as an additional service at a cost.
Another common problem with NPS is that it comes in terms of rating. If you rely on the ratings, you miss out on the more nuanced, human aspects of that feedback. You can be tempted to add more qualitative questions, but longer surveys deter people from responding.
You need to balance the amount of information you seek with the amount of information people participating in the survey want to share. NPS is effective because it uses a simple 0 – 10 rating and one or two qualitative questions.
If someone rates 0 without a comment, our account manager reaches out to understand the issue, often arranging a brief call to gather feedback. And people respond to that.
Our customer advocacy also conducts exit interviews. Not all customers participate, but a good number do.
We also do the same for accounts we lose in the Sales process. We say congratulations on selecting another vendor and try to understand how we can improve. It doesn’t work all the time, but it is often effective.