Customer Success: Determining Which Customers on which to Focus

From a Customer Success perspective, this is the wrong question to ask.

You must “focus” on all customers since proper Customer Onboarding is critical for all customers to achieve their Desired Outcome.

The way you operationalize around all of your customers to ensure they’re all Onboarded in an Appropriate way will come down to logical Customer Segmentation.

For context, on Friday, May 19, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video is embedded below and below that is the transcript (edited for better readability) that answers the question.

What users to focus on during Onboarding and Engagement?

So the question is “When looking at data and focusing on super users and zero users, who leverage with adoption tactics. Do you find it’s best to pursue feedback from super users, zero users, or both?”

I’m assuming when we say super users and zero users, that we’re talking about within one company.

I would think … So, in that case we have one customer company that has sort of that, gradient or spectrum of use within their user base, just from that one account. In that case, yeah we would probably want to figure out what’s going on there. We probably need to recognize that instead of just looking at them as super users and zero users, I would look at them

We probably need to recognize that instead of just looking at them as super users and zero users, I would look at them as, are there … Who are they? What are their titles? What are their roles? What’s actually going on in that company?

And you may start to see some patterns that, it’s not just super users, it’s developers … They do this, but those closer to zero users, those are more the project managers, those are more of the designers and you start to see different personas.

And now we have a better view of what’s going on, and we can’t freak out when those personas of different roles, those different roles or different personas, you now have a different use pattern, right? So we need to figure out what that is.

That’s one thing that I would look at. But yeah, talk to your customers. If you see some really, this really crazy discrepancy there, we need to figure what’s going on.

We also need to understand that the secondary onboarding, or the onboarding process that occurs when somebody that went through training, that was sort of an early user of your product, brings in others … You really need to think about that second wave of onboarding. That whole process needs to be just as streamlined as that initial cohort of users.

Very often, they’re not. Very often, we have our initial cohort of users that goes through training, that goes through this very specific process, and then we let everybody else in.

So I don’t know what’s going with your customer, you need to figure that out. But those are a couple of ways that I would look at it, you know, is there an onboarding issue, and/or are there just different personas that are going to have different use patterns, and we shouldn’t freak out when certain personas aren’t using it on the daily, because that’s just fine. Right?

So we need to figure out more about what’s going on there.

About Lincoln Murphy

I invented Customer Success. I focus primarily on Customer Engagement. Learn more about me here.