It’s seven months into COVID and the world has completely changed while standing still at the same time.
I recently talked to Kevin Benedict on Regalix TV about customer success and much more.
Farm, Don’t Hunt – The Definitive Guide to Customer Success | Guy Nirpaz, CEO/Founder, Totango
If you’re interested to check the book out, the link is just here below.
I recently recorded an episode of The Human Duct Tape with Jeanne Bliss.
From the episode abstract:
Customer success is more than just a buzzword, and Guy Nirpaz, the CEO and founder of Totango talks to us about how to actually integrate customer success into the customer experience. In today’s episode, Guy talks about the importance of delivering value to the customer and across the entire customer lifecycle. It’s about understanding that you need to create lifetime value that goes beyond the number of transactions had with a customer.
Spring break was last week, great opportunity to mix business and fun in NYC. We stayed in an Airbnb apartment on the lower west side of Manhattan, walking distance from many great places.
We had a chance to try 3 great Israeli restaurants – Tel Aviv quality standards (which means very high)
Taim (which means tasty in Hebrew) is a great falafel place which we ran across. The same Chef has a fancier restaurant called Balaboosta (which means a great housewife in Yiddish) – great food, although a bit pricey.
Had an amazing Israeli breakfast (including Jachnun) at 12 chairs cafe. All links are below. Enjoy
I’ve written recently that MAU and DAU are the most important metrics for Customer Success.
I’ve received in an email with the following comment:
“How does MAU and DAU, which measure interactive consumption of a service, are applied to products and services that are inherently revenue share models such as Ad-Tech and Fin-Tech?”
That is a great question and I’d like to answer it in this post. For that purpose I will assume that I’m the VP of Customer Success of Google AdWords product. This product allows you to create online ads web or mobile that are displayed by Google and drive traffic (or people) to your website. Simple and genius at the same time 😉
This is the service – when you look for a “Fender Guitar” Google serves you with these ads
Here’s what an AdWords customer needs to do in order to present their ads, taken from the Google AdWords website.
Simple, success is guaranteed: create your ad, people see your ad on Google and you get more customers.
Well, not quite that simple. The customers are successful and see value if they get more customers. But for that they need to: create great ads, bid on the right keywords – basically continuously manage their ad spend and optimize the keywords and conversions.
The good new is that in this business, the customer’s ability to attract new online customers is clearly in the best interest of the ad business provider. In other words, as the VP of Customer Success of AdWords, I would do everything I can to make sure my customers are successful in attracting online customers thru my ad service.
So what are the metrics for success in this business? In other words what should I be measuring in order to know if my customers are successful or not?
I need simple and actionable metrics that my team can act, metrics that I can develop my success programs on.
A simple approach (good, we like simple!) to the key metrics of customer success in this use case would be to measure daily the following metrics:
- number of active ads
- money spent on ads (daily and overall budget)
- visitors (traffic)
And indeed these metrics are important. I would definitely keep track of those key metrics for every account in my AdWords business. The challenge, they are not very actionable. Changes in these numbers is more actionable once a baseline is established.
So, how MAU and DAU can help in this case?
Customers that really get the most of out AdWords, constantly bid on new keywords, optimize their ads. They do this by using the ad management feature set, they use the keyword search tools and most important, they review daily the spend, visitor and conversion reports.
Although there is one side of this business which does not involve the customer once ad is active, there is a lot of management and administration on the other side of the business that is very important for the success of the customer.
Buy tracking DAU on the administrative tools as a whole, and DAU on a per tool/module I will be able to have additional critical metrics that are all actionable and predictive:
- Account with daily use – takes ad spend seriously and has a very high growth potential
- Account with many people that are involved in the project manages probably multiple brands / products and for that reason, is responsible for a bigger ad budget.
- Customers that don’t add/change their ads nor ad new keywords and don’t look at the performance reports – don’t have a professional approach towards online ads.
I hope this post give you a better sense on how to use DAU and MAU for customer success programs for any business.
I’d like to be clear: Customer Health, is not designed to be a churn predictor. Think about yourself, going to a regular checkup at the doctor’s office. A good doctor will check your vital signs: blood pressure, height, weight and in some cases will ask for a blood test that goes deeper into various indications like body fat, cholesterol, vitamin deficiency and so on.
A checkup is not designed necessarily to determine if I’m going to die this year or not. I’ve recently lost 20 pounds since my doctor noticed my extra weight and discovered fat in my blood.
I’ve changed my diet, became vegetarian cut back heavily on alcohol consumption. I’ve taken action based on the finding of my health check.
Companies should monitor customer health – it’s easy! But they should do it in order to take action. Prioritize based on health (good/green – bad/red) and determine the necessary action based on the symptoms (health reasons).
I’ll write another post about the importance of churn/upsell predictions.