Chapter 25
Measuring the Health of Your Relationships
The key to leveraging inbound service as part of a new business development strategy is happy customers. Measuring the health of your relationships will help you understand which customers are thrilled, where you are exceeding expectations, which customers are in good shape, and which customers fall below the minimum threshold for success.
Service teams need to have all the customer's information for success, for example, call back information, email addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, order history, payment terms, service records of past issues and fixes, and relevant meeting notes to build the proper context for their interactions. They need a centralized view of the customer every bit as much as the marketing and sales teams.
To build a customer success mindset into your service department, inbound organizations create a separate team alongside service. HubSpot calls this group inbound success to clearly differentiate their mission. Inbound service means reacting promptly to all requests and solving the immediate issues customers have. Inbound success is the proactive application of a process to ensure customers see long-term value from your products and services and benefit from using your solutions. Inbound success focuses on making the customer better and delivering more value after the initial sale is made.
Health Check as a Best Practice
Inbound success requires that your team knows the status of every customer relationships at every point in time. You must understand the progress toward achieving the goals agreed upon when the customer bought your solution.
HubSpot starts thinking about the health of every customer in the activation stage then assesses customer health periodically through the customer journey. At least 180 days before a contract comes up for annual renewal the customer renewal team reviews all available information and runs a detailed “health check” to assess how successful each customer is with the product.
Health checks are an analysis process that determines the customer's usage of the product, results they are receiving measured against their goals, and the overall experience. Health checks are a programmatic way to conduct an in-depth investigation into the success of the customer using the products, with an emphasis on progress toward their goals.
Mike Ewing, HubSpot customer renewal manager, says:
Health checks have produced an impactful benefit to our customers' success by identifying specific areas for specialized team members to address. We look at over 20 different factors to conclude if a customer is in a Green, Yellow, Orange, or Red category. The four categories are:
- Overall Health
- Product Usage Health
- Value Health
- Experience Health
Once documented in HubSpot's CRM, we pass the health checks onto the account management team, which creates playbooks matching the results of the health check category. These playbooks guide the team to provide content and resources the customer needs to maximize their chances of meeting their goals and renewing their HubSpot agreement. This focused assistance to our customer base has been a significant driver of increased customer happiness and success.
I love that HubSpot is constantly striving to proactively drive customer success and value. Health checks are the latest iteration, and are a process I think that can be adapted and adopted by many companies of all shapes and sizes.1
For HubSpot, about 80% of a health check is evaluated by reviewing the customer's usage of the product and 20% is subjective. Usage data includes login frequency, application use, emails sent, and workflow creation. The health check also considers the success customers are seeing using the products such as leads converted and customers acquired. Some of the subjective assessments include looking at the customer's website to see if they are following inbound marketing best practices, the quality of the blog posts they are publishing, and reviewing the content of emails and social media posts.
HubSpot starts the health check process six months before the renewal date so that they are proactive and address any lingering issues that can be solved. Three months after the health check-up, the customer success team reassesses the account to see if there has been measurable progress. This proactive process, starting well before the renewal date, drives the customer's success and maintains a high retention rate.
HubSpot uses the health check process to notice trends with healthy customers as well. The service team is aligned with the sales account management team and regularly shares health check feedback when they see opportunities for sales to reengage with a customer and point out a small success, explain an area of concern, or advise them even more.
Inbound success is proactive, jumping in before a customer gets stuck. Inbound success relies on a solve for the customer attitude, as much as data and process. Inbound service people must be empowered, motivated, and compensated appropriately.
Giving your service team bad tools and incomplete information, sending them a bunch of angry customers, and asking them to fix the relationship doesn't make sense in the age of buyer control.
Service Alignment with Marketing and Sales
Marketing, sales, and service form the backbone of the customer success team. Inbound organizations align all three around the same inbound strategy. Sales, marketing, and service alignment revolve around three key components:
- Customer volume and pace
- Good customer fit
- Team communication
To provide adequate staffing levels, allocate resources, and define an effective service plan, an inbound service team needs to know the number and type of buyers projected to start at any given time. Seasonality throughout the year, and velocity during the month, impacts this schedule.
Two of the largest failures of traditional service departments are:
- Inability to define the buyer success journey in a systematic and detailed way
- Limited resources available at the day and time they are needed
Good customer fit is as important as pace and volume. The better the fit of the customer to the buyer persona, the greater the chance of buyer success after the sale.
Michael Redbord says, “The goal is to align the promise of value, made during the earlier stages of the buyer journey, with the achievement of success by the buyer once the customer success journey begins. The promise of value must align with what the inbound service and success teams manage, so the buyer's expectations are met.”2
Marketing, sales, and service/success alignment requires constant feedback loops. The leaders of the sales and service departments must be in regular contact exchanging data and context so that both groups adjust and help each other, as needed. The most valuable asset the inbound organization has is the contact/customer database, which includes information about the buyer's behavior. The data gathered during the early buying stages should be shared with the inbound service and success teams, so they deliver on the value promises made to the buyer and meet or exceed their expectations.
In turn, inbound service and success teams feed data and context back to the sales team to improve both the individual customer relationship as well as to adjust future customer acquisition. The information gleaned from successful customers is helpful for inbound salespeople to understand so they can identify new good fit customers. A sound communication loop allows the inbound service and success teams to give the lead back to the salesperson at the appropriate time to start the Value Loop stage, thus extending the relationship with the buyer even further.