When looking at the health of a customer there are many key factors to consider about the customer journey and all the various KPIs for measuring churn, CSAT, retention rate, etc. But once a customer is operational and stable, it’s easy to start losing the tight relationships that were built during onboarding and stabilization of the customer. While those relationships could have been bumpy at points, a successful implementation usually leads to great relationships at all the important levels. As time goes on the relationship with the decision-makers on the account can often reduce to interfacing just during the QBR.  This customer situation can even be worse when the decision-maker leaves the company or takes on a new role and new management enters the picture.

Currently, KPIs are not focused on touchpoints as they are a contributing factor to other measurements but not necessarily a fundamental element of the relationship with a customer.  It’s human nature for the CSM to feel comfortable with the reduced contact since the account is running smoothly but if the aim of the CSM is to be a trusted advisor, then the minimization of the touchpoints will hurt the long-term relationship and the prospects of renewal.  Therefore this is an important KPI to define and measure. We’ll call it the Customer Contact KPI. Sales has a similar KPI but the results are the inverse of the Customer Contact KPI.

There is a simple 3 step process to ensuring the Customer Contact on the account:

1. Define where the relationships should exist.
   1. Who should you be in contact with as a CSM?
   1. What type of conversations should you be having?
2. How often should the CSM be contacting the person
3. Tracking the contacts

Effectively we need to set a KPI for contacts and ensure that the contact points are providing value to the customer.

When working with executives you don’t want to waste their time so be sure to have an agenda and update on past issues. If you’ve reached the point in a support relationship where there are no support issues to discuss, then work to identify future opportunities for collaboration. What are the pain points the exec is feeling and is there a way your company can help? Have they experienced any other issues with other vendors that they want to avoid experiencing again and is there a solution your company can provide to ensure it doesn’t happen with your service or even the third-party service?

By defining the above and then measuring the success of the contacts you can expect to see direct results in other KPIs that are better business indicators. This process should help with increased CSAT, NPS and decreased Churn score. It’s a way to measure the operational input from your CSM team that has a direct impact on your business-level KPIs.