Customer Success Assessment Instrument

Introduction

How mature is your organization in its customer success journey? Do you believe you are well on your way? Or perhaps you are trying to develop a customer success strategy and are not sure where to start. This tool will help you find out how you stack up relative to best-in-class companies and provide insights, recommendations and specific calls to action from your results. Take a few minutes to go through the tool and answer nine questions focused around the three pillars of customer success:

Listening: How well do you listen to customers across the entire customer journey?
Engaging: Do you truly collaborate with our customers and do they seek our advice?
Ensuring: Are you proactively working with customers to make sure they are actually achieving value from your solutions?

Once you’ve answered the questions, you will immediately get a summary of results showing how you compare to best-in-class organizations. You can also download a more detailed report. Questions? Reach out to us at contact@mainstaycompany.com

Demographic Questions:

1. Size (revenue) of your organization?
2. Your organizations industry?
3. Your functional area?

Customer Success Questions:

1. Are you collecting customer data on solution consumption/adoption?
2. Are you assessing your customers' realization of business outcomes?
3. Have you established listening posts across your customers' lifecycle?
4. Are you able to tell a story to the CxO of a company that would compel them to purchase / repurchase your solution?
5. Have you developed a sales and marketing strategy that focuses on retaining your customers?
6. Do your customers view you as a thought leader in your industry?
7. Do you regularly capture best practices and performance benchmarks for your solutions and provide them to all of your customers?
8. Do you regularly help customers improve their solution adoption (# of loyal users) rates and optimize the consumption (best # of solution features) of their solution?
9. Do you regularly quantify and communicate the value (e.g., ROI) you have delivered to your top 100 customers?

Customer Success Assessment Instrument

Below is a summary of your results based on the 3 pillars of customer success (Listening, Engaging, Ensuring). The spider chart gives you a picture of where you are based on your responses versus best practice organizations. The chart will show where there may be some critical risks in your organization.

Listen

Limited understanding of how customers are adopting/consuming your solutions.
Untimely or sporadic understanding of how customers are consuming your solutions.
Good visibility into historic customer adoption and consumption across all segments.
Proactive and predictive view of customer consumption and health - reviewed regularly with customer.

Assess usage of products/services but do not assess customer value.
Occasionally assess customer value on an adhoc basis.
Regularly assess value for a select group of customers.
Utilize an established approach for assessing customer value and business outcomes and do so continuously and in real-time.

Typical early listening posts are customer satisfaction related. These are important programs but are just the tip of the iceberg in today's 'customer-first' economy
Many companies have experimented with listening posts across the lifecycle but lack a cohesive program to cross-correlate the results and build broader insights from these listening posts and extending the visibility of the data collected from these posts to relevant functions (e.g., sales, marketing, service, support, product development)
Strong set of customer listening posts that have been well integrated into other functional areas such as marketing, sales, product development, service and support.
Listening best practice companies have taken the diverse listening posts and extended them to include smart products (e.g., Internet of Things) that provide near-real-time performance insights and requisite actions.

Engage

Your current value proposition focuses on features and functions of your solutions.
Communication of your value proposition is solution-focused but lacks business outcome proof points.
Your value proposition is business-impact focused.
Communication of your value proposition stimulates meaningful conversations with the executive buyer. You are viewed as a thought leader in your industry.

Sales and marketing focused primarily on lead generation and order taking.
Sales and marketing focused on solution-selling but lacks quantification capabilities
Sales and marketing actively collaborate with customers to quantify business outcomes.
Sales and marketing have designed programs that take the business outcome results and deliver comprehensive retention, upsell and cross-sell activities to maximize the return on customer.

Your company, leaders and content have limited exposure and influence in the marketplace.
Your company regularly places content and executives in industry journals and conferences but we are still building our thought leadership brand
Have established a leadership role in influencing our industry and direction of business peers.
Customers and stakeholders regularly seek our strategic insights.

Ensure

Rarely or never capture best practices or performance benchmarks.
Occasionally capture best practices and performance benchmarks on an adhoc basis (e.g. white paper).
Regularly work with selected customers to capture best practices and performance benchmarks.
Employ proven methods to proactively capture, quantify and communicate best practices and performance benchmarks on an ongoing basis with all customers.

Limited or no work with customers to improve solution adoption.
Occasionally work with customers to improve solution adoption on an ad hoc basis.
Regularly work with key customers to regularly understand and drive adoption.
Proactively communicate and collaborate with customers to achieve adoption goals.

Rarely or never quantify or communicate business value created for our customers.
Occasionally quantify and communicate the value of our customers
Consistently quantify and communicate value with key customers.
Regularly quantify value and help customers achieve the full potential business outcomes from our solutions.

Recommendations

Listen

Pilot a Listening program by acquiring a better understanding and detailed data about how your top 100 customers are adopting and consuming your solution.
Identify customer success technologies to provide visibility that can help scale your adoption more cost effectively.
Identify ways to share customer adoption findings and insights with your sales organization and other functional areas.
Develop a customer health-check scorecard and proactively review with all customers on a quarterly basis.

Pilot the impact of measuring customer value by analyzing the benefits achieved at your top 10 customers (by revenue) and assign senior executive sponsorship for accountability.
Analyze the existing program activities to determine what can and cannot be scaled. Identify improvement opportunities and define a more comprehensive approach that will deliver the value results across a wider set of customers. Identify the programmatic elements for success including supporting tools, processes, deliverables.
Given the success of your program across a subset of your customers, the next step is to scale your customer value-realization to the majority of your customers. This will require an assessment of how to increase the scope of your services without requiring an army of resources. Best practice companies employ tools that empower the sales and customer resources to extend the capabilities of the customer success teams.
With a strong value realization program in place, the data being collected is often an under-utilized gold mine. By taking the customer value-realization data/findings and repurposing the data to create thought leadership content such as industry or solution white papers with customer proof points of business impact, your company will be well positioned as an innovator in your industry.

Identify a small customer segment to pilot a more comprehensive listening program. Typically the segment is for a highly valued solution for your company's best customers. Once the target solution and customer segment has been identified, build a set of listening posts that capture critical data on the success of the customer (e.g., adoption, value, service, support)
Begin a customer lifecycle x listening post map which highlights those areas that you're collecting data and those that are missing. Develop a next generation program that looks to fill those gaps and provide a coordinated effort to gain visibility across the entire customer lifecycle.
Fully leverage the insights of your listening program to create battle cards that present timely opportunity/actions to drive business results (e.g., sales lift, net promoter scores, customer profitability, product innovation) to improve the return on investment for your listening program.
Identify ways to differentiate your products and services to create new customer-valued capabilities. As an example, for transportation management, providing real-time feedback to truck drivers on their compliance with speed and duration regulations to reduce insurance costs.

Engage

Identify which of your existing sales and marketing assets are most used by your sales organization and to identify where customer demand truly is for your marketing content efforts. Determine how to best connect with your customer solution needs.
Identify the most impactful solution marketing content that requires an 'upgrade' with customer proof points and quantification of business impact. Work to deliver a 2nd edition of these assets that includes business impact data.
Extend your business-outcome sales and marketing assets beyond a top-of-funnel focus. Develop a new set of marketing assets that resonate with the existing customer base to help them to understand how to mature to new levels of business outcomes by leveraging additional, complimentary solutions from your company (setting up new upsell/cross-sell opportunities).
Create an internal publishing capability for your company. This marketing content publishing team would identify the top conferences, channels to place the thought leadership, setup an annual agenda, look to external 'thought leaders' to extend the brand, and manage a social media calendar to continuously impact the marketplace.

Develop a customer journey map that identifies the needs of the customer at each stage of the relationship and defines a set of company actions to address these needs.
Develop a business-case, quantification of value sales and marketing capability that justifies investment opportunities for your customers.
Leverage the results of the business case activities to generate an "adoption scorecard" that presents realized value vs. targets from the business case and adjust quarterly with your key customers.
Capture the results of these activities for customer reference purposes. For example, the results of these activities can be used for reference stories, conference materials, executive briefings, and customer advisory boards.

First, ensure your thought leadership content agenda is sufficient to meet your thought leadership goals. Second, Identify and target publishing and speaking opportunities that matter to your customers and ensure your content drives a level of innovation and insight for that audience.
Partner with key customers, channel partners and thought leaders and further enhance your brand and extend the reach of your thought leadership programs.
Identify opportunities to become the 'go-to' destination site for industry/solution insights. This will require a well structured and consistent publishing engine to deliver compelling content, deliver the content through a variety of channels and position your company's leadership into the top conferences/speaking events.
Identify new products/services that can meet the future needs of your clients and work closely with product development to build them into product roadmaps.

Ensure

Pilot for a single solution and a limited set of customers (5-10) a simple program to demonstrate the capture of performance metrics and business use cases.
Create a programmatic way to capture business use cases and performance metrics for your top solutions. This program will embed the service into the company's go-to-market approach, communicating the 'adoption service' as part of the post-implementation delivery plan. Your sales teams benefit from communicating that the company has confidence in the business case and will 'audit' the business outcomes on an ongoing basis. The customer benefits from having additional resources to help ensure business adoption.
With a solid adoption service in place that continuously captures best practice use cases and performance metrics, proactively package and communicate these findings out to all customers via blogs, customer advisory boards, marketing white papers, etc.
Design internal programs to feed the results of your business use case and performance metrics back into the relevant business functions (e.g., product development, professional services, customer support).

Pilot an adoption-assessment and roadmap offering for a single solution with 3-5 customers. Leverage the results of this pilot to communicate to your leadership the impact this program can have on a broader basis and a plan to scale up this capability.
Leveraging the lessons learned from past activities, develop a scalable adoption methodology including tools, templates, deliverables.
Identify ways to leverage the adoption services results to create new upsell/cross sell opportunities. Leading adoption programs communicate new use cases or performance improvement opportunities back to the customer account teams to start new dialogs and enhance the executive relationship.
Industry leaders not only provide premier adoption services but they work with the client to define new ways to go-to-market to their customers. Redefining the industry dynamics and competitive differentiation for their customers.

Pilot a value-realization program for a small set of customers (5-10) for a single solution. The pilot program should include a review of the existing value drivers to ensure there is a comprehensive OPEX and CAPEX financial view, a strategic and risk view, and an operational KPI view included in the analysis. The pilot program should identify the proper customers that can help to quantify the business impact metrics and provide a solid reference of your solutions' capabilities. Finally, the output of the program should deliver valuable assets to the sales team (e.g., website copy, white paper, conference materials, ROI tool).
Leverage your existing program to capture benchmarks to use for more scalable tools. Once you have developed a 'working set' of sales and marketing assets from these findings, look to find ways to scale these best practices across other solutions, industries, etc.
Identify ways to capture the “full potential of your customer value realization services. Value Realization leaders not only capture this information but do so in an integrated fashion making it possible to run statistical analyses on the data, provide trending and other data-driven results back to their customers and executive leadership.
With a strong understanding of the business value realized at each customer, identify new ways to deliver innovation to their operations. Present new industry innovations to your customer executives and then partner with them to experiment with new outcomes-based revenue models with their top customers.

Call-to-Action

Listen

Our customer-adoption services can provide insights on adoption progress and quantify business benefits of improving customer adoption. Together, we will build a game plan that includes a 90 day action plan to improve your customers' adoption and quantify the associated benefits of doing so. Please visit our website at (www.maintaycompany.com).
Mainstay's Advisor platform is engineered to scale your customer success efforts. By creating a simple cloud tool, we empower your customer success managers to collect adoption data and provide prescriptive actions to ensure customer value realization. See (www.mainstaycompany.com/advisor-platform/) for more information about our Advisor Platform.
Extending the results of your customer success activities directly to the customer account teams empowers the field to support corrective actions, identify upsell/cross sell opportunities, and raise the level of relationship to the executive level. Mainstay's Advisor Platform creates a simple, mobile sales-facing portal to present the results of your customer success activities in a graphical, "executive ready" report. Check out our cloud platform at (www.mainstaycompany.com/advisor-platform/)
Mainstay helps clients to create an online customer success scorecard that provides timely and periodic reports directly to the customer. By creating a cloud-based scorecard of success, customers can anywhere, anytime get the pulse for the value of the products/services of your company and be able to more quickly identify ways to maximize the value of your solutions. For more about our capabilities to support your efforts, please visit (https://www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-and-cio/)

Mainstay helps our clients to define a value assessment pilot program based on past client best practices. We bring over a decade of experience to help define the process, tools and success metrics to streamline the pilot process. Please see examples and more details on our services at (www.mainstaycompany.com/target-track-measure-for-it/)
Mainstay has a proven methodology to take your existing assessment program, identify the components that work well and eliminate those that cannot scale or underperform. By helping to tune your program, our team will create a next generation program that creates the scalable insights that will provide a quantum leap in customer success results. Please see examples and more details on our services at (Need landing spot for this service).
Mainstay's Advisor Platform has been designed to support your scaling efforts for value realization. The ability to collaborate with your customers, sales teams and channel partners all drive the ability to scale your value realization activities in a cost effective manner. See more about our Advisor Platform at (www.mainstaycompany.com/advisor-platform/).
Mainstay has partnered with many of the top high tech companies to build their thought leadership materials, from analyst white papers to conference presentations and many other formats. Our team extends the capabilities of your team to help package the data collected from your customer success activities and present a compelling, value-based report to accelerate sales. See more about our though leadership content services at (www.mainstaycompany.com/research-whitepapers/).

Mainstay provides voice-of-the-customer services that can help you design a well structured and comprehensive listening program. See our website for more details at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay provides voice-of-the-customer services that can help you plan and prioritize the most impactful listening posts. Our team can help your organization design the pilot approach to ensure success and leverage best practices from our other clients. See our website for more details at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay helps our clients to maximize the return on their listening programs by designing battle cards that: 1. Identify the top actions/activities that drive sales 2. Design customer battle cards that provide the right functional team with the right customer insight in a timely manner 3. Track the actions and results of these actions with automated workflow from a cloud based tool, please visit our website at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay works closely with our clients to identify new, compelling opportunities to drive innovation. Our team provides strategic consulting support to take these opportunities and build the business model to quantify the business impact of IOT solutions. Our team has worked closely with industry leaders such as Cisco, Deloitte, Oracle and many others to design their IOT solutions. For more information, please visit our website at (Web Page URL).

Engage

Mainstay partners with our clients to prioritize the right assets to add business outcome data and then leads the effort to collect this data. Our team brings a proven set of consultants, methodologies and tools to deliver the business outcome data and reposition this data into your existing marketing assets. Please see our website for more information at (www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-customer-success/).
Mainstay provides an objective viewpoint of what your sales teams and customers are demanding and then uses this information to work with your teams to design the proper marketing content plans. Please see our website for more information at (www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-customer-success/).
Mainstay helps our clients to develop customer journey maps. These customer lifecycle journey maps help to discover new marketing opportunities to quantify the phased business outcomes that these customers could capture post the first sale. Please see our website for more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay provides a scaling capability to our thought leader clients. Our team provides social media technical writing capabilities, graphics and creative support and strategic research capabilities to enhance the production output of our clients. Please see more information about our services at (www.mainstaycompany.com/mainstay-social-media-value-engagements/).

Mainstay partners with our clients to define the customer journey map and the set of company actions to best address the customers' needs at each stage of the relationship. Our team can then help to build the appropriate marketing or sales assets/tools to fill these gaps. Please see our website for more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay works with many top high tech companies to deliver business case services to accelerate sales results. Our team has delivered over 600 business cases to Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of IT solutions, from applications to infrastructure. Please see more information at (www.mainstaycompany.com/roi-case-studies/).
Mainstay supports the development of sales and marketing assets that maximize the return on investment of your retention activities. Our team can re-package the results of your retention audits to deliver compelling reference stories, ROI white papers, conference presentations, etc. Please visit our website at (www.mainstaycompany.com/retention-marketing/).
Mainstay has developed a service called "target-track-measure" that can help you to structure the approach to extend your business case results across the customer lifecycle. TTM services include design services plus we bring capabilities to audit your clients' results, presenting an objective, third-party lens into the process. Please see more information regarding our services at (www.mainstaycompany.com/target-track-measure-for-it/).

Mainstay provides research, technical writing and creative services to help extend the capabilities of your marketing resources. See more at (www.mainstaycompany.com/multi-media-tools/).
Mainstay helps to deliver innovative, thought provoking content for our clients. We bring over 15 years of experience writing compelling ROI white papers, conference materials, executive briefings as well as serving as expert analyst resources to build our clients' brand. For more information, please visit (www.mainstaycompany.com/roi-case-studies/).
Mainstay partners with our clients to help design a business-relevant content engine, one that produces on going content that allows you to engage your customers in new ways. As a first step, we help to design a pilot approach that focuses on a single solution over a 6 month timetable to prove out the impact of a well-structured thought leadership program. See more at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay helps to discover new solution use cases/applications that will serve the needs of tomorrow's customers. Our strategic consulting resources, processes and tools will help ensure alignment between sales, marketing, partners, and product development. For more information, please visit our website at (www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-customer-success/).

Ensure

Mainstay provides valuable expertise in designing business use case and performance metrics capture programs. Our team will partner with your marketing and sales teams to embed the adoption service into your existing customer engagement processes. Our team can also help to train your teams on the requisite skills to make the adoption process a success or serve as expert partner resources to deliver these services. Please see more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay supports industry leaders such as Cisco, EMC, and Salesforce to define business use cases and performance metrics. We help our clients to package these results into customer facing assets across a wide spectrum of marketing and sales assets. Please see more information at (www.mainstaycompany.com/multi-media-tools/).
Mainstay provides valuable expertise in designing business use case and performance metrics capture programs. Our team will provide a turnkey service to design, capture and present the results to prove out the impact of this capability. Please see more information at (www.mainstaycompany.com/monthly-it-value-communications-office/).
Mainstay provides strategic consulting services to take business use cases and performance metrics and identify new product/service opportunities to create new sources of revenue and broaden the business impact to our clients' customers. Please see more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.

Mainstay assists our clients in developing a scalable adoption program, identifying the right processes, tools and resources to execute effectively. Please see more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Mainstay assists our clients in developing the pilot approach, identifying key customers to include in the pilot, execute the pilot and then communicate results to our clients' leadership. Please see more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.
Our team helps translate adoption results into sales communications that accelerate sales. We work closely with our clients to analyze performance data, create industry business use cases and package these findings into assets that marketing and sales can use for future sales opportunities. Please visit our website for more information (https://www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-customer-success/).
Mainstay works as a strategic partner with our clients to help brainstorm innovation opportunities for our clients' customers, packaging the results of these activities into compelling calls to action for our clients and their customers. Please see more information at www.mainstaycompany.com.

Mainstay can help you to stand up your pilot from soup to nuts. Our team can help design your program, build your value model, interview your customers and produce the marketing and sales assets to provide a solid return on your pilot investment. Please visit our website at (www.mainstaycompany.com/marketing-customer-success/).
Mainstay can help you to audit your existing content, pulling out the most impactful benchmarks and setting up a scalable program to take across other products, services, and customer segments. See more at (www.mainstaycompany.com/customer-success-for-it/).
Mainstay has worked with many of the leading technology companies to help identify innovations for their customers' industries. Our team works closely with our client strategic consulting and product marketing teams to help generate new product/service opportunities that open new markets for our customers and our customers' customers. Please visit our website at www.mainstaycompany.com for more information.
Mainstay has created an industry leading cloud tool, called Advisor, that can help capture your value realization metrics into a performance data warehouse. With the data structured and centralized your team will be able to maximize the impact of this data to your customers, partners, and executive leadership. Please see more at (www.mainstaycompany.com/advisor-platform/).

Register to download a more comprehensive report with specific recommendations based on your assessment Accept Cookies to Download

Registration:

Company Name
First Name
Last Name
Email Address

Download Report