Alerts

Alerts are used to drive immediate awareness and timely reaction to customer at-risk behavior or specific situations that are concerning, such as:

• Significant decline in overall feature adoption or monthly active users

• Unpaid overdue invoice 

• MRR contraction

• High-volume support tickets from the customer within a short period of time

• The customer submitted a detractor NPS score.

CS team should leverage alerts as their early warning system to bring exceptional and potential churn scenarios to CSMs’ attention as soon as they occur with a lightweight playbook that is predefined with a set of best next actions.  

Goals

Success Goals are used to track a plan of action to help CSMs guide customers to the desired business outcome. These plans could be a predefined process (using an admin-configured goal template) or a one-off project (using an ad-hoc goal).  Regardless of how they are defined, Goals cover two main use cases: internal and external goals.

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/touchpoints and to-dos that need to happen within a targeted timeline and desired dependency. 

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 toward improving that business-specific metric. 

External Goals empower the CSMs to keep track of activities and communication leading towards the customer’s perceived value and allow them to constantly validate and showcase the value delivered to the customer with a solid and referenceable track record.

Task Management

Tasks are used to track any action performed by the CSM and help keep a record of it. There are multiple ways a task can be created - through a goal, alert or manually created by the CSM.

Goals playbooks generate tasks, but are more involved than Alert playbooks. Alert playbook is a template for a set of single tasks. Goals playbook is a template for a series of dependent tasks with potential due dates. 

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are used to record any kind of customer meetings that have taken place or will be taking place. Touchpoints can be created manually by the CSM or through the touchpoint scheduler task. 

Some of the common touchpoints that are created are Kickoff meeting during Onboarding, QBR/EBR meetings, etc. 

Use Cases:

• Alert playbooks are used for urgent and timely account situations where the actions are simple and straight-forward. It is attached to an alert that enables proactive and immediate reaction to customer risks. For example, you might instruct CSMs to ping a customer when their usage metric drops by 20% week-over-week.

• Goals playbooks can help you track and manage more in-depth and involved processes that cover 30-90 day periods.

• Goals help CSMs track processes, while Goals reporting helps managers track how those processes are working overall.

• We can have a goal created and have tasks and touchpoints associated with it. For example, Onboarding goal would have multiple tasks and touchpoints associated to it. Some of the common tasks on an onboarding goal would be "Check customer information before kick-off", "Setup the configuration," and "Prepare go-live". Some of the touchpoints on it would be "Kick-off call", "CSM Introduction", etc.