In this article:

  • Overview

  • Why do you need Success Goals?

  • What goes into a Success goal?

  • Who can create Success Goals?

  • Common Examples


Success Goals help you define what will make your customers successful with a measurable metric, build a plan to help attain that success and easily track and quantify the progress towards that metric. 

 

It contains a playbook that captures what a customer success team should do as a series of tasks to achieve a goal. Example: first-year renewal, Onboarding.

 

A playbook for first-year renewal success goal for the high-touch customer segment might look something like this:

 

CS Intro → Health check call → Tickets review with TAM → Feature updates email → Metrics/goals review  → Renewal email → Sales/contract negotiation → Renewal completion

 

A success goal is always anchored to a business outcome to be achieved. It facilitates a CSM to achieve the desired goal and provides them with all the intermittent checkpoints they need to complete along the way. These checkpoints can include meetings and tasks. 

 

Administrators can define custom playbooks and use Goal automation to prescribe Goals that customer success managers (CSMs) need to finish to keep their portfolios healthy. This allows standardization of a framework at every stage of the customer lifecycle across the team as well as to measure and report against it.

 

Why do you need Success Goals?

 

Customer Success teams face many unique challenges, and it's more important than ever to standardize and automate your processes. Implementing Success Goals can be easily accomplished. It helps predict and manage customer risk better and drives expansion and advocacy at scale.

 

 

Without Success Goals

With Success Goals

  • Inconsistent, non-standardized playbooks → not scalable.

  • Inefficient → low productivity.

  • Not data-driven, difficult to measure CS effort → cannot improve the process.

  • Standardized playbooks → makes it efficient to scale.

  • Automated deployment, hence faster → higher productivity.

  • Metrics-driven reporting makes it easy to iterate and improve processes.

 



What goes into a Success Goal?


A Success Goal consists of four essential elements: playbooks, tasks, metrics, and duration. To set up your Success Goal in Freshsuccess, use the following framework as a guide.

 

 

Identify the business outcome/success goal

Select the right metric(s)

Choose or create the playbook

  • What is the desired business outcome? Define what success looks like. 

  • Goals are most effective when time-bound. For example, reduce churn to under 1% by the end of the year.

  • The metrics you choose should align with your goal and strategy. 

  • Pick metrics that clearly measure progress towards the defined goal

  • The metrics selected should inspire action. They should be able to indicate what actions or tasks to execute to address the problem. 

  • A playbook is a collection of tasks that must be executed to achieve the goal.

  • Each task in the playbook should ideally have a quantifiable effort (duration) that influences the goal metric defined. 

 

 

As illustrated in the framework above, a Goal helps customer success managers work towards an outcome by performing a series of tasks (a playbook) on applicable accounts. Each task in the playbook is applied as per the schedule defined by you, which starts when the Goal is first activated on the account.

 

Who can create Success Goals?

 

Both customer success managers (CSMs) and administrators can create Success Goals in Freshsuccess. 

 

To help strike a balance between manual and automated customer engagement, there are two modes by which you can create Success Goals.

 

  1. Automatically: Administrators can define Goal Templates that all users can access. Admins can also choose to manually deploy or auto-deploy these goals across accounts at the time of goal template creation.

 

  1. Manually: Users can also create their own goals from scratch besides the ones available in the Goal template library via the 'Add new' option on the top-right. These goals will be visible only to the creators and the watchers added. These will not be part of the Goal library that a user can choose from. 

 

Common Examples 

  1. Onboarding Goals

Goals capture a set of checkpoints and action items the CSMs need to complete in order to deliver a smooth and timely onboarding experience. It can be auto-triggered upon customer sales hand-off date 

  1. Adoption Goals

Goals capture the ideal engagement model the CS team follows to help their customer properly adopt the product in the first 90 days. It can be tracked against adoption metrics such as MAU, health score or seat utilization and can be auto-triggered upon onboarding go-live date. 

        3. Retention Goals

Goals capture the expected CSM activities and communication cadency they should follow through in the first year with their annual contract accounts in order to drive a successful renewal. 

Pro-tip: A Success Goal can have different playbooks for different segments of customers. When choosing or deploying playbooks, select the one that is best suited for that segment, region, stage and/or tier.