ROI for Customer Success

If you think that calculating ROI for knowledge management or self-service is hard, try assigning a value to a customer success program!

Since customer success is usually an either/or proposition, where all customers (or all customers above a certain size) get attention, it is very difficult to prove, quantitatively, that customer success programs make a difference. Here are some alternative approaches:

• Just say no to ROI analyses. Having a customer success program of some kind is pretty much mandatory and its success can be measured, but not through a standard ROI analysis. A good place to start would be to see that churn is decreasing over time.
• Does more customer success mean more success? For instance, if you add a monthly check-in step, do you see more renewals, less churn, more expansion revenue? Then you have a good indication that the monthly check-in adds value.
• Do you see lost opportunities due to a lack of a coherent customer success program? For instance, is a large chunk of support requests related to training? Are you surprised by unexpected contract terminations? Do you and your team spend a lot of time managing escalations? In each case, you can cost-justify a customer success program by quantifying the savings.

Have you tried to compute the ROI of your customer success program? What did you find?