For many, the thinking is that there’s a lot of customer information out there that might have some minimal value, but if you could just get a handle on how/if they are using your product(s), you’d have the problem 90% solved.
Let’s examine this claim more closely. Let’s say you had a perfect scoring methodology for usage. So, if you had a customer who scored an 80 on a scale of 1-100, it really would indicate that that customer is using exactly 80% of your product. If you scored all your customers and knew that the average score across your install base was 72, would you really need any other data?
How about a few hypothetical questions to make a point:
- What score did the users give us on our last NPS survey?
- What score did the decision makers give us on our last NPS survey?
- Does it matter what this customer is saying to us on our surveys?
- How long have they been a customer? If they just signed up, is that usage an indicator that they are in training or is it our Services team using the product to get them set up and configured?
- What is their contract value? If this customer is one of our top 10 in terms of contract value, is 80 still a good score? What’s the average usage score of our top 10?
- How many renewals have they done? Did the value of their contract go up or down with each renewal?
- Are they doing anything for us on the marketing side? Referrals, references, speaking engagements? Does this matter to us?
- How many times have they called Support in the last 30 days? What’s the 6-month trend on that number?
- Have they bought any of our other products? Have they upgraded?
- How much money have they spent on Training and Services?
And one last question – aren’t there a whole lot of things, in addition to usage, that really do matter in evaluating customer loyalty?
