Internal Goals
Key Use Cases
Internal Goals capture standard CS processes to provide the needed structure and guidance that all CSMs should follow in order to better engage with their customers and help them become more successful.
It contains a playbook that describes what the CS team should do with a set of tasks they need to complete along the way. These tasks usually include meetings and do-tos that need to happen within a targeted timeline and desired dependency.
Automation
Internal Goals can be manually deployed to an account based on when a CSM thinks the process should start for that account, or be auto-deployed to an account based on specific automation rules.
Measurement
More than that, an internal Goal can be anchored to a measurable business metric to allow the CSM team better track and quantify the efforts towards that metric.
Both automation and measurement allow process standardization at every stage of the customer lifecycle across the team and empowers the team with quantifiable measurement and report against it.
Common Examples
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
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.
Expansion Goals
Goals capture the action items to nurture and follow-through customer cross-sale and up-sale opportunities. It can be tracked against revenue metrics such as MRR and can be auto-triggered upon customers exhibiting potential expansion behaviors such as increased seat utilization and user activities.
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.
Availability & Configuration
Internal Goals are usually defined by the CS managers and can only be configured by the system administrator in the Settings -> Management Center -> Goals Template. Note that the Goals Automation feature and the ability to add any existing account metrics as the Goals KPI metric are only supported for the Internal Goals.
External Goals
Key Use Cases
External Goals are leveraged and created ad-hoc by individual CSMs to help record customer-tracked success metrics and build a plan to work with the customer towards improving that business-specific metric.
External Goals empowers the CSMs to keep track of activities and communication leading towards the customer’s perceived value and allows them to constantly validate and showcase the value delivered to the customer with a solid and referenceable track record.
Availability & Configuration
External Goals can only be manually created and prescribed to an account by the individual CSMs. When creating an External Goal, CSMs can optionally enable the Goals Measurement feature to record the customer’s elaborated business metric as the Goals KPI.
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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.
Next up
Need assistance setting up your Success Goals on Freshdesk Customer Success? Learn how to set Goals up by referring to Setting up Success Goals.
