What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

The technical definition of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the revenue earned from a single customer over time. It’s an equation that subtracts the cost to acquire a new customer (CAC) from the total revenue from that customer. The goal is to make the revenue-over-time from each individual customer as high as possible.

But the technical definition doesn’t cover the magic that’s actually in customer lifetime value – as a metric and as a mission for a digital marketplace,  an e-commerce site, and SaaS businesses. Because when you go after customer lifetime value with intention, making it one of your “North Star” metrics, you’ll find that the cost-to-acquire actually shrinks. It becomes less expensive to acquire new customers, and the revenue pours in exponentially. 

We are also at an inflection point with SaaS. While many SaaS companies are still largely concentrated on acquisition-based growth through demos and trials, we’re seeing a shift to focus on the end-user and the metrics that capture how happy they are, because those end-users lead growth. And that’s where customer lifetime value comes in as a business case. It is the ideal way to tie customer loyalty to revenue.

Those end users who are sticking with you are buying more from you (cross-sells and upsells) and they’re telling their friends and colleagues how great you are (referrals). In a sense, they become your virtual sales army. They’re out there warming up leads and sending them to you, so you don’t have to pay to find them. 

This is the magic we’re going to unlock for you in this comprehensive article. If you want to know how to maximize your bottomline, then improving Customer Lifetime Value is key. And we’re going to explain how it all works, and how you can start using it to get better ROI for your business right now.

Part 1: Making the case for Customer Lifetime Value as the key metric for your customer experience strategy

I don’t know a single company that hasn’t pondered these questions:

• What resource investment will have the most impact on customer health and revenue growth? 
• What can (or should) I automate?
• Should I invest more money into customer experience (CX), customer support, or customer success right now?
• Should we focus on building this new feature or should we focus on infrastructure improvements that might make our platform more secure or faster, etc.?
• Should we invest in self-service onboarding to improve the journey for the end user?

The answers to all of these questions lie in Customer Lifetime Value. 

If your business thrives on high-volume sales and high turnover, then you’re probably not a subscription-based business – but you also don’t need to worry so much about customer lifetime value. 

But, if your business would benefit from high-volume sales AND returning customers AND lower acquisition costs, then customer lifetime value is your metric, and you’ve probably got your answers to the above questions. The more you invest in both user experience and customer experience, the less you have to invest in customer support, leading to organic growth and a higher customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value isn’t a passive metric – a numerical pat on the back for when you’ve done a “good job.” It’s an active, actionable metric that can be used in a few different ways.

Let’s look at a few different ways to use the Customer Lifetime Value metric:

CLV as Profit Metric

Traditionally, customer lifetime value has been used as a benchmark for whether your business is going well or going under. You look at your CLV/CAC ratio, and if it works out to at least 3 or higher (for every $1 dollar you spend acquiring a customer, you earn at least $3 dollars) you’re in the clear. You could then calculate the CLV/CAC ratio across your marketing channels to determine which are creating the most lifetime value (invest in those more) and which aren’t.

CLV as Customer Persona Builder

Once you start parsing out which clients have the highest customer lifetime value, you can look for what they have in common in terms of demographics, psychographics, user behavior, how they found you, and other characteristics. You can then use those commonalities to create better customer personas so you can go after higher CLV clients with intention.

Predictive CLV

Customer lifetime value can be used to predict the lifetime value of new customers when you examine current behavior and purchase patterns, and then base projected behavior and patterns based on those early indicators. You might already know how to predict churn based on “red flag” customer actions, and this concept is the same but in the opposite direction. You look for retention and upsell-predictive behaviors by reverse engineering what your best customers did at the beginning, middle, and ends of their journeys with you (if they’ve ended!). 

CLV as Key Performance Indicator

Customer lifetime value is a broad KPI of how well you’re serving clients, how valuable your product or service is to them, and how well you’re delivering your solution with the appropriate customer experience. It’s a great North Star metric. You know you’re headed in the right direction as CLV rises. But, you’ll also need metrics that tell you, more granularly, what’s going on and why at each stage of the customer journey. So we also use Customer Journey Metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction, etc.

Once you start tracking customer lifetime value, you can a lot with it to improve your business – which we’ll get to in Part 3. But for now, let’s look at customer lifetime value as an equation – or really, several equations.

Part 2: Customer Lifetime Value as Equation – how to crack the code of calculating this complicated metric

If you are not mathematically-inclined, I’ll make this as straightforward as possible. 

Customer lifetime value is revenue you expect to receive from a customer over time, less the cost of acquiring and keeping that customer. 

Here it is in equation form:
CLV = (ARPU X average # of months or years retained) – (CAC + CRC) 

People have been refining ways to calculate more accurate CLV ratios for years. What’s so hard? So. many. variables. Here are the basic numbers you’ll need for the CLV calculation for a SaaS business:

Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer (ARPU)

Here are all the different ways customers bring in value in a subscription software business model.

• Original revenue
• Renewal revenue
• Upsell revenue
• Cross-Sell revenue
• Referral Revenue

Most calculations only deal with original revenue and renewal revenue, but that doesn’t cover the whole picture. When calculating Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer (ARPU) for our customer lifetime value equation, just remember to account for upsells and cross-sells, not just original revenue and renewal revenue. Referrals take care of themselves — they’ll show up in the customer acquisition cost (CAC) calculation because you’ll see that you’re getting more new customers without spending more on sales & marketing.

You’ll also want to know your CAC because the two are intertwined. Your CLV will increase if you are able to increase revenue from customers while maintaining or lowering your acquisition cost. 

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much you spent on sales & marketing in a given time period (learn more about this here)

Divided by…

How many new customers you gained in the same given time period

Customer Retention Cost (CRC)

The cost of serving the customer is often overlooked in CLV calculation. And if your onboarding customer success and/or customer service programs are significant, you definitely want to factor in Customer Retention Cost. Totango, a Wootric integration partner, wrote a whole book on calculating CRC, but a quick estimate looks like this: 

How much you spend to onboard, train and support customers in a given period

Divided by…

How many new customers you gained in the same given time period

Customer lifetime value calculation in non-subscription models

One more way to calculate CLV is through a predictive model that can be highly accurate. This method is common in consumer businesses such as e-commerce. That equation looks like this:

CLV = (Average monthly transactions X Average order value) X Average gross margin X Average Customer Lifespan*

*The average customer lifespan is calculated in months.

Segment Customer Lifetime Value to make it more actionable

Calculating customer lifetime value for your company can be revealing and is a great start to working with this metric.  Like measuring NPS though, it really isn’t actionable until you start segmenting the metric. To make customer lifetime value more actionable and predictive, you’ll want to separate these numbers by customer segment and acquisition channels. That’s when you’ll be able to optimize your acquisition strategies to raise your CLV rates even higher.

Start by looking at customer lifetime value by pricing tier or persona. For example, you may discover that the CLV for enterprise customers is no higher than self-service customers once you factor in the high cost of acquiring and supporting “the big fish.” 

Part 3: The 4 Most Powerful Ways to use Customer Lifetime Value to grow your business

To use CLV as an actionable, predictive, productive metric, you have to segment your users and rank them by their CLV. Then you can look at the data you’ve collected on them – which acquisition channels they came from, what their first interaction was on your website, what their customer journey looked like through onboarding and beyond – to optimize each stage of the customer journey.

And then you can return to customer lifetime value as a ‘big picture’ measurement of your optimization progress. 

Here are three primary ways to use customer lifetime value to optimize acquisition and retention.

1. Optimize your acquisition strategies for CLV – and use CLV to optimize your acquisition strategies.

Your CRM platform should tell you which channels customers came through to find you, and you may notice that your high-CLV customers tend to come from one of those channels over the others. 

One of the most clear-cut stories of how a big company used customer lifetime value to increase profit is IBM. IBM used customer lifetime value to determine the effectiveness of their marketing channels to attract high-spending customers – direct mail, telesales, email, and catalogs per customer (yes, this is an old story – way back in 2008). When they reallocated resources to the best-performing channels, they 10Xed their revenue. 

It’s low-hanging fruit to decide to spend more marketing money on the channels yielding the highest CLV clients. But we can go one step further.

2. You can use your Customer Lifetime Value to create better buyer personas.

Yes, this requires a platform that can gather all of the available information on each customer. But use whatever information you’ve got. You will find that your high CLV customers have a lot in common (though you may need to form segments for the commonalities to clearly emerge). 

Once you have your high CLV buyer personas, you can use them to form marketing, outreach, and retention strategies based on their specific acquisition channels and user behavior through onboarding and retention. 

For example, let’s say that you find that your high CLV clients come to you through G2 or Capterra. And once they reach your site, they don’t just “buy now” – they have at least one interaction with your live chat helpline. Your high CLV customers need a conversation before converting, which means if you tweak your G2 listing or website content answer their questions without having to reach out, you’ll likely see higher conversions from customers who’ll stick around.

3. Use Customer Lifetime Value with Customer Success for higher retention rates & referral revenue

Customer lifetime value and customer success are so intertwined as to be inseparable. Why? Successful customers don’t leave. So, when you want to improve your customer lifetime value, having a customer success program in place is one of the best ways to do it. Customer success asks, at each stage of the customer journey: What is the customer’s ideal outcome, and how can we best move them towards it? Then the customer success team can create strategies around supporting customers at pivotal moments – like places in the onboarding process where customers tend to get frustrated and leave (Customer Effort Score surveys are ideal for flagging these points of friction) or using churn-predictive behaviors to ‘red flag’ certain interactions to receive Customer Support pop-up chats.

4. Use Customer Lifetime Value to obtain more referrals from customers.

Your long-term high CLV customers are your brand ambassadors and influencers, and once you identify them, you can start to leverage that by rewarding and strengthening their connection to your brand. That could be something as simple as inviting them to be part of a free Beta testing group, so they can give you their insights into the next iterations of your product or service, or even just asking them to write an online review. Some businesses host online communities for their best clients, or offer them priority support.

Want an even easier way to identify the customers most likely to refer you to others? Learn how to use NPS surveys to not only find your promoters, but encourage them to promote you more.

5. Use Customer Lifetime Value to guide product design and validate product development decisions at the business level.

Product teams may be removed from revenue goals on the day-to-day, but strategic decisions about where to expend engineering resources should be made with business impact in mind. Product can use CLV to inform what customer segments the product should be designed for.  Building CLV-related goals into user stories or feature specifications can help prioritize the roadmap and provide a success metric for retrospective once the product is out the door. 

Part 4: 10 Ways to Increase & Optimize Your Customer Lifetime Value

1. Prioritize customer experience above everything else. And don’t just say it; measure it with metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Effort Score. Calculate and track churn rates and engagement metrics.
2. Invest in customer success. Customer success drives acquisition, retention, and customer spending (upsells and cross-sells), raising customer lifetime value by helping customers achieve their ideal outcomes.
3. Invest in UX testing. The data you get from UX testing makes your product easier to use, reducing friction, and making it a must-have tool for your users. 
4. Pay special attention to onboarding. Churn happens most frequently during or shortly after onboarding, so paying attention to churn-predictive behavior patterns (often identified by a Customer Effort Score survey) in the onboarding process can help you form a strategy to smooth those friction points and find easier ways to move your client towards meaningful success milestones.
5. Bring product management, customer success, customer support, and marketing together in shared responsibility for metrics. Collaboration between product and customer success is common, but it is a good idea to expand the team because they have so much to gain from working together. For example, with onboarding, product managers need to understand how their tech decisions affect adoption and retention metrics; and customer success teams need to have access to onboarding user data that helps them identify upsell opportunities. Some shared metrics for success include NPS, churn rate, trial conversion rate, adoption rate, and, of course, customer lifetime value.
6. Use CLV as a segmentation tool.  This allows you to deliver appropriate experiences to customers who are high-value, and who have the potential to become high-value. The appropriate experience might be the level of customer support each segment receives, or the messaging they get throughout their buyer’s journeys. You may also find that each CLV segment has different pain points and needs, which you can target for even higher acquisition and retention rates.
7. Ask your most loyal customers for support. Following up a positive NPS survey response with an automated request for an online review is simply asking happy customers to follow through on what they just said they’d be willing to do. They’ve already said yes – so make it easy for them to act on promoting you. This won’t directly affect your CLV score, but it will drive down your CAC as the referrals come in.
8. Keep customers engaged by adding value to your product or service, or through high-value content. If you don’t have substantial updates/improvements/expansions planned for your product, you can keep customers engaged with educational materials–i.e. content that helps them reach their ideal outcomes faster and easier. This has the added benefit of being useful for top-of-funnel marketing as well.
9. Listen to your customers and act on their feedback.  Voice of customer data is so important for improving products and reducing friction. The only problem is that sentiment analysis at scale can be difficult without the right tools.
10. Don’t “acquire customers” – build relationships. The customers who stay with you the longest feel like they know you. They feel like you know them. You’ve become an integral part of their daily lives, and they’d miss you if you went away. So consider changing the way you think of acquiring customers. You’re building relationships. And the more personalized and personal you make your customer interactions, the more likely your customers will feel connected to you and committed to your brand.

Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value is really a whole-company effort, requiring a great product, great service, and a deep understanding of your customers’ needs, frustrations, and desires. It’s a ‘big picture’ metric; a North Star number to guide you towards creating better customer experiences. But this one metric can also shed light on valuable segments and strategies that can profitably impact your business. customer lifetime value is a number you can’t afford to ignore.

Building and maintaining the product roadmap is a central part of your role as a product manager. Yet there is surprisingly little consensus about product roadmaps across the product management community. Opinions vary wildly, for example, about what exactly a product roadmap is, how to structure one, what to include in it, and which tools you should use to develop it.

In this post I will offer a few guidelines for how to structure your product roadmap in ways that can lead to the development of a successful product. But before we dive into these suggestions, I would like to start with two fundamental points about roadmaps — points I hope will make the guidelines that follow much clearer.

The top-down approach to product development works best.

For successful product development, I recommend a top-down product strategy. Product roadmaps fit very strategically into this hierarchy. Here’s how it works.

Start with your product’s vision — which you’ll derive from your company’s larger strategic objectives. Then translate that high-level vision into actionable goals. Next, turn those product goals into your product roadmap. Finally, move from your roadmap to your backlog.

Starting at the highest level, and working your way strategically down into the details, is the best way to stay focused and on track toward your main objectives — and to avoid losing sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing and getting lost in the weeds.

And speaking of getting lost in the weeds…

A product roadmap is not a list of features.

A list of features is just that — a list of features. The product roadmap, on the other hand, is a strategic document that represents your high-level goals for the initiative along with an execution strategy to communicate how you plan to achieve those goals.

A roadmap might include features, of course, but the features themselves are only a part of the execution plan.

Five Guidelines for Structuring Your Product Roadmap

1. Product Roadmaps Should be Flexible

You’ve got to be okay with uncertainty. You’ve got to be willing to embark on your product plan, knowing that you can’t possibly know everything at the outset — that you will hit surprises, challenges, and opportunities along the way. Your roadmap needs to factor in these uncertainties — and needs to be flexible enough to allow you to change course quickly when necessary.

To avoid making promises you can’t keep, make sure your stakeholders understand that the roadmap is not an end-all, be-all document. One way to do so is to show more granularity in the short term while keeping your initiatives high-level and your dates approximate in the long term.

Thinking in themes is another effective way to keep your roadmap flexible. For example, maybe you and your stakeholders have agreed to focus on increasing conversions from a particular target persona in the upcoming quarter. This area of focus becomes your theme, and you retain the ability to reprioritize specific features and fixes within that theme while keeping the overarching goal intact. Likewise, if an opportunity arises that was not originally on your roadmap but furthers your shared goal, you’ll have an easier time making a case to include it.

Finally, a flexible roadmap can be a headache if changes are not communicated promptly and effectively. Ensure your stakeholders always have access to the most up-to-date version of the roadmap, whether that means storing it on a shared wiki or using cloud-based software that automatically updates. Transparency is key to building alignment on product strategy, no matter how frequently you need to reprioritize.

2. Product Roadmaps Should be Deeply Rooted in Well-Thought-Out Goals

This might sound like a contradiction to the previous guideline — but it’s not. You can frequently reprioritize your backlog while still staying true to well-thought-out, agreed-upon goals.

Your specific roadmap priorities might need adjusting in light of new information — in fact, they almost certainly will at one time or another. But you should be prepared to adjust focus in your roadmap, reallocate resources or otherwise change direction only if doing so is in alignment with your product’s high-level strategic goals and vision.

As a product manager, it’s your job to make sure that you’re making decisions about what to do, and what not to do, for the right reasons. Even if a sales executive is loudly demanding the immediate inclusion of a new feature to close a deal, you still need to weigh the request in light of your organization’s strategic goals. Quick wins do not necessarily spell long term success. If the feature isn’t in line with your product vision, it’s okay to say no. Indeed, if you’re doing your job well, you’ll find yourself saying no quite often.

3. Product Roadmaps Should be Developed with Plenty of Input

You don’t need to craft your roadmap yourself. You shouldn’t. Silos rarely work for any business function, and for roadmaps they can lead to ill-advised plans and products developed without critical knowledge.

To successfully bring a product to market, or to update an existing product in such a way that benefits the customer and your company, you’ll need plenty of input from experts across a variety of teams and departments. That includes, for example, engineering, customer support, sales, and marketing.

Sales, for example, will have valuable anecdotes about their most recent wins, or their most important ones. They can also tell you about the features prospects and customers are asking for.

As for your engineers, the more you involve them in the creation process, the more ownership and responsibility they will take for their role, and the more creativity and enthusiasm they’ll bring to the project. Collaborating with your engineers, and soliciting their help, will make them feel more like a part of the process, and less like order takers simply being told what to do by a product manager.

Prabhat Jha, CTO of the Net Promoter Score platform Pearl-Plaza adds, “Be sure to solicit plenty of user input. Some years ago I learned this the hard way. The software enterprise where I worked did not have a rigorous system in place for listening to customers. We had collaborated internally on our roadmap priorities and thought we knew our customer’s needs. We missed key features, though, and as a result, there was very little adoption of the first version of the product. We ended up having to do a second release very quickly in order to get traction.”

4. Product Roadmaps Should be Visual

Ultimately, a product roadmap is a communication tool — an execution strategy you will use to convey your product plans and goals to a variety of constituencies. And the best way to communicate a complex initiative is visual. If your roadmap is simply a long list of features presented in a spreadsheet, people’s eyes will glaze over.

Visual roadmaps make it easy for everyone in your strategy meetings to quickly understand what you are proposing and hoping to accomplish quickly.

Another valuable reason to make your product roadmap visual is that it forces you to be ruthless about which initiatives to include and which to leave out. Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s “10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” instructs that PowerPoint presentations should have 10 slides, last no longer than 20 minutes, and contain onscreen text no smaller than 30 points. In addition to making the presentation more digestible for an audience, this exercise forces the presenter to distill both the whole talk and each slide down to its most essential elements.

The same is true for product roadmaps. If you use a visual tool for creating your roadmaps — such as PowerPoint or a visual roadmap software application — that exercise will force you to distill your plan down to only those initiatives that serve your product’s strategic goals and vision.

Looking at this from another angle, if your roadmap contains 1,000 initiatives, that probably means you haven’t done a good job of prioritizing and strategizing what needs to be included in your product. Indeed, if you do have a list of 1,000 initiatives, your document could probably be more accurately called a backlog than a roadmap.

5. Tailor Your Roadmap Discussion to Your Audience

You are likely going to show your product roadmap to many different constituencies, in many different meetings, throughout the development cycle of your product. Each constituent group will have a unique focus and set of priorities, and each meeting will call for you to delve into different aspects of the product roadmap.

There are a couple of ways of accomplishing this. You can create separate roadmap documents for each constituency, or you can use a single, general roadmap and zoom in to what’s important for each group. The important thing is that you provide your stakeholders context and show them how your plans will further their unique goals.

For example, for your sales team, you might want to highlight the aspects of your roadmap that are designed to bring them better-qualified leads — for example, a trial version of your software that can help to prequalify interested prospects.

Customer-facing teams also likely had input into the features that made it onto your roadmap in the first place. Be sure to communicate to them where their requests fit into the plan (or didn’t) and why.

However, when presenting the roadmap to your executives, you’ll want to focus on how the choices you’ve made will lead to increased revenue or grow market share.

And when meeting with your engineering team, you’ll want to focus both on the high-level themes and specific feature details and discuss how your engineers can help to make those product goals a reality.

In other words, you want to keep your product roadmap flexible enough that it can help facilitate a productive meeting at any level of detail needed, with any constituency group you are presenting to.  

Conclusion: Whatever structure your product roadmap takes, its main job is to communicate your strategy.

A product roadmap needs to communicate your strategy. It is your job to create your roadmap in such a way that it lays out a high-level execution plan for the product’s successful development and eventual launch into the market. It’s also your job to make sure all relevant constituencies understand the goals of the roadmap — and work with you to achieve them.

New things will always come up — cool ideas for new features, requests from executives for a shift in priority,  urgent demands from sales reps, and so on. The challenge for the product manager is to view each one as an opportunity to evaluate through the lens of strategy and goals and help drive a sound decision-making process.

That’s why you need to start with your product vision, and from there derive specific goals — and only after you’ve developed those goals, build your product roadmap. If you haven’t fully fleshed out your vision and strategic goals for the product, it’s too early to start building your roadmap.

About the author:
Andre Theus is the Vice President of Marketing at ProductPlan. He works closely with customers and prospects to build better product roadmap software. Prior to ProductPlan, he was a member of marketing teams at RightScale, Sonos, and Citrix. Andre received a master’s in computer science from the Cologne University of Applied Science in Germany.

In this guest post, Nathan Lippi, Head of User Research at PandaDoc, shares a Pareto principle approach to getting the most from a B2B Net Promoter Score program. 

NPS. It’s debated, loved, and hated, but in the world of B2B SaaS it’s rarely used to its full potential.

At PandaDoc, we’ve become increasingly customer-obsessed since the introduction of our NPS program two years ago, but we feel as if we still have meaningful room for improvement.

We’ve found there isn’t much written about NPS, specifically for B2B companies, so in order to level up, we’ve gone straight to the experts. With their permission, we’re sharing some key findings here.

We hope this guide helps you to get the most out of your CX program.

Let’s get to it!

The main purpose of NPS is to drive action

NPS is an easy, trusted, and benchmark-able way to start driving customer-focused action at your company.

Many companies obsess too much about the number when they’re starting out.

However, the most successful companies never lose sight of the fact that the primary purpose of customer experience metrics is to drive customer-focused action.

Once you’re driving customer-focused action, you’ll start to actually reap the benefits of increased retention, expansion, and word of mouth.

One Oracle VP’s Three-Step Recipe for NPS Survey Success

Joshua Rossman is an NPS OG, having run NPS at eBay and McAfee, among other companies. He’s now Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy at Oracle.

Through his years of experience, Rossman has created a three-step system he uses to get the most out of customer experience surveys, including NPS. He’s been kind enough to give us permission to share it publicly.

Step 1: Ask an easy-to-answer anchor question first to improve response rates

This principle is standard for NPS, but powerful enough to use across other CX surveys.

Ask your broad question first, and get a quantitative rating. Making your first question easy to answer will improve your overall survey response rates.

Step 2: Get S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C with your open-ended ask

Rossman has found that the standard open-ended question, “Care to tell us why?” often leads to vague, inactionable responses (e.g. “It’s hard to use”).

He’s found that asking promoters for specific reasons they recommend — and non-promoters for specific ways to improve — leads to much more actionable feedback.

Here are the specific questions he recommends for brand-level NPS:

Promoters: “What is it that makes you most likely to recommend {{company}}?”

Non-promoters: “What is it we could do that would make you more likely to recommend us in the future?”

These questions ask more specific questions — and tend to get more specific answers.

Various platforms such as Pearl-Plaza can help you automatically categorize your now-more-specific NPS verbatims!

Each company will want to tag their work in a way that makes the most sense to them, but Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth at Atlassian, says that they used machine learning to tag their feedback into three categories: Reliability, Usability, and Functionality. They used the ratio of different complaints to understand, at a high level, where their product needed work.

Step 3: NPS’ Secret Third Question

Even with the more specific responses, you’ll hopefully get from the tweaks recommended in Step 2, not all B2B companies get such a high volume of responses that they can glean mathematically reliable responses from text alone.

One way to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to an excellent (or poor) user experience is to follow questions about satisfaction with questions about various attributes of your brand. Ask a few extra questions with NPS and you can capture the overall sentiment for each area:

After you’ve captured these details you can then run a simple linear regression, which will tell you which factors most influence if a person is a promoter or a detractor.

Various versions of the linear regression technique were also mentioned by Allison Dickin, VP of User Research at UserLeap, and other experts.  Hearing them reinforce the power of this third question helps us get really excited about what we might do with it.

“Extra questions should be used judiciously,” counters Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “Think about it: When was the last time you responded thoughtfully to a multi-question survey?”

If you’re worried that such a long third step may lead to a negative user experience or lower response rates, a lighter option may be to ask the respondent to tell you what drove their score by selecting from a pick list of reasons.

If your follow-up question to detractors is, “What is the main thing we need to improve?” you could offer a picklist that includes product, support, training, and value.

Not only are you learning what’s driving your score overall, but you’re also generating groups of users to follow up based on their interests. For example, your customer support team can learn more by reaching out to detractors who cite “support” as an issue.

Drive Strategic Action with a Cross-Functional Cadence

You may have noticed that our first heading was about driving action on behalf of the customer.

We’re touching on it again because, ultimately, driving action on behalf of your customers should be the primary concern of an NPS program.

Driving tactical action on behalf of customers was something we were already doing well at PandaDoc, before talking to the experts. Getting NPS data into Slack and other systems has been a pillar of our NPS program — this helps us take immediate action on issues that surface in feedback. One example: reaching out to an unhappy detractor and quickly fixing the issue that her NPS feedback brought to our attention.

However, learning how many companies drive strategic action on behalf of the customer in the following way, was eye-opening:

• Collect customer feedback in a central repository (NPS, sales feedback, CS feedback, etc. — all combined together, somewhere like Pearl-Plaza, UserVoice, or ProductBoard.
• Perform a 360° analysis of this data on a quarterly basis
• Set up a monthly cross-functional cadence to decide which action to drive, and to track progress and accountability on ongoing courses of action

Fictional Examples of Driving Strategic Action:

Product Team

Diagnosis: Self-serve onboarding is our most common NPS complaint.  People often come away without understanding our platform’s core concepts.

Initiative: Improve self-serve onboarding to teach core concepts of the platform.

Success Team 

Diagnosis: Feedback about CS indicates all roles except admins are quite happy. Admins specifically have trouble understanding how to set user permissions, and they’d rather avoid going through training to learn something so small.

Initiative: Create micro-videos that explain to admins on how to manage user permissions.

Support Team

Diagnosis: NPS feedback indicates enterprise customers are unhappy with the time it takes to resolve support interactions involving custom features. 

Initiative:  Route tickets from enterprise customers directly to senior agents who have the expertise and product knowledge to resolve their issues.

Marketing 

Diagnosis: Many of the leads we’re attracting cannot benefit from our core value proposition.

Initiative: Better align their SEM campaigns and landing pages with promises that the product can fulfill.

Your metrics should flow from your unique business strategy

NPS has been sold by some as the be-all / end-all metric of a customer-centricity program. But this approach can be harmful.

While NPS is often a great way to understand brand-level sentiment, it makes sense to layer on additional metrics as your CX program progresses.

Jessica Pfeifer at Wootric and Allison Dickin at UserLeap agree on the idea that your CX metrics should flow from what’s most critical to your business’ success.

“You’ll be able to benchmark and track trends over time when you complement NPS with established customer experience metrics like CSAT, PSAT, or Customer Effort Score at critical touchpoints in the customer journey,” says Pfeifer.

“For example, you might trigger a Customer Effort Score survey to gauge how easy it is for a user to achieve ‘first value.’ What is that critical milestone in your product? In PandaDoc’s case, it might be sending a document. Here at Wootric, it’s when a customer has live survey feedback flowing into their dashboard.”

Both took time to talk to us about questions that can be used in addition to (or as an alternative to) NPS. Here are some examples:

Example Non-NPS Questions

Takeaways

• NPS is a great way to get started with driving customer-centric action
• Use Josh Rossman’s three-part system to get the most out of your CX surveys, including NPS
• Use analysis and a cross-functional cadence to drive org-wide, customer-focused action
• As your business grows, layer on metrics that fit your specific business needs

This is just the tip of the iceberg for NPS, but we hope it will help your company squeeze the most out of your CX research program.

Hit me up on Twitter (@nathanlippi), and to let me know what’s worked well for you and your company!

So you’ve been reading up on Net Promoter Score. Your colleagues in the SaaS world tell you that it’s the best way to take your customers’ pulse. You’ve seen a few case studies claiming it’s the only number you need to measure.

It’s true that Net Promoter Score is a great way to engage with your customers and solicit tons of feedback. But it’s also true that there are quite a few nuances that result in a successful survey program.

As a SaaS company with SaaS customers like Zoom, DocuSign and Hubspot, we have a unique perspective on NPS in cloud software. To make the most of your time and energy, we’ve put together this list of things SaaS businesses should know before they dive into the NPS world. Read More…

Financial markets are sliding, a pandemic is spreading around the world, and every company is scrambling to respond to quickly changing circumstances. Planned investments that were intended to drive growth — like hiring, media spend and software purchases — are being reevaluated as business leaders are forced to triage what they need to do to weather the storm. We’re all in survival mode, but survival is about prioritizing what is most important.

And what is most important to a SaaS business at this moment?

It’s not toilet paper.

It’s our existing customers.

Now more than ever, customer experience is job #1. 

We think the SaaS businesses that focus on retaining customers and building loyalty are the ones that will survive and thrive in this uncertain climate. 

Of course, the question then becomes how do you retain customers and build loyalty?

Shift from a growth mindset to a retention mindset 

This may not hold true for every business we work with – Zoom, GrubHub, and the e-commerce toilet paper company Who Gives a Crap are having quite a moment. But most businesses are facing contraction because people don’t buy in a panic. Budgets are being trimmed everywhere, and customer success and renewal conversations must be deeply empathetic to this.

So, if a customer is achieving goals with your software, and you have other features and capabilities that will make them even more successful in 2020, then, by all means, paint a bold vision of an expanded partnership. But, if that isn’t the case, and they want to reduce or leave, don’t come across as tone-deaf. It’s likely that everyone in their company has been asked to find ways to trim spend.

That means that it’s even more important to know that your internal champion can confidently advocate for you – because you are delivering value. Step up your customer success initiatives. Make sure you and your clients are recording successes. And don’t be afraid to change the conversation from trying to get the customer to buy more, to showing him or her how the company can get more value from what they’ve already purchased.

Listen to your customers even more carefully – and respond

Even when you’re focusing on your existing customers, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re the “same” customers – they’ve changed. We all have. Because our needs change in a downturn. Companies that are on the pulse of those changes by proactively listening are better poised to adapt, innovate, survive, and serve.  Make calls to key customers.  It’s even more important now than it usually is to listen and respond to concerns quickly. 

Take care of your people

Your employees, your teams, are the key to your customer relationships. They may be concerned about their health or the health of their parents, or grandparents. They may be struggling to find childcare options if their schools are shut down. They may be stressed about their 401K balance. Whatever it is, empathy and flexibility are going to be key – and so is prudent business planning. How can you plan to support your employees through these challenges?

Be a good citizen

For the collective good, and for the good of your brand, it’s so important right now to prioritize the good of the community and show conscientious, caring judgment. To do this, you may need to make some tough calls that hit your short-term profits, but protect people. We’re all making sacrifices – the New York Times dropped its paywall for coronavirus news and Zoom is giving K-12 schools free video conferencing. Is there a way your company can help people in need right now? You’ll be remembered for it. 

Establish a company policy of flexibility

Just as you have to be flexible with your employees and their quickly-changing challenges, you also have to be flexible as a company. For example, if a client calls customer support to request an extended payment plan, empower your support team to deviate from your standard policies and allow it. Be open to changing how you usually do things if it makes sense and shows compassion. You’ll likely prevent avoidable churn.

Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, shared this recent story with our team:

“I just had a customer reach out about putting their subscription on hold. They operate in the hospitality sector which has been particularly hard hit. We offered to work out a plan to enable her to continue to get customer feedback during this critical time. Her response was ‘That would be amazing! Thank you!’ I know we’ve strengthened customer loyalty.”

Customers notice the companies that support them in difficult times, so be flexible when you can, and you’ll build loyalty for the future.

Close the loop with customers when they offer feedback

This may be built into your CX program already, but if not, now is the time to double-down on listening and responding to customers. Ensuring your customers feel heard and cared about in times of high stress carries more weight than when times are easy. So if a customer responds to one of your surveys, be sure to close the loop and let them know you value their time and will take appropriate action. 

Customer success managers can reach out one-on-one via email or phone, but that isn’t always practical. Closing the loop can be automated when you have your feedback readily available in systems like Intercom or Salesforce. Here’s a quick guide on how to automate closing the loop on customer feedback.

Improve customer experience at customer journey touchpoints

In SaaS, this often means using an NPS survey to gauge overall loyalty and surface any issues that may affect renewal. To get serious about retention, consider asking for feedback at critical SaaS journey points–after onboarding, support interactions, and during product/feature use.

This isn’t about quickly adding a slew of new surveys overnight; it’s about prioritizing improvements to moments that, if not successful, can sow the seeds of churn. Now is the time to double-down on understanding and improving the customer journey.

Also, remember to analyze the qualitative feedback from these surveys. A customer who is “satisfied”  but mentions a concern over price may now be at a higher risk of churn.

Focus product development on reducing friction for existing customers

In the software business, product experience is the all-important driver of customer experience. So, to foster customer loyalty, think about what you can do to create more ease for existing users.

Blake Barlett at OpenView says product-led growth is the key to success in the End User Era. In this era, end user annoyance spells opportunity. Think Slack vs. email, or Zoom vs. Hangouts.

In financially uncertain times, a product-led development philosophy can hold the key to faster end user adoption and increased retention. Tune into those day-to-day annoyances – they hold the key to retention.

Accelerate end user adoption

Happy end users make your application stickier, so if your champion is struggling to persuade others in their company to use your platform, you need to know why. You may need more in-app cues and guidance to make tasks easier. What is “so annoying” about your product? Ask your customers that, and you may find exactly what you need to reduce friction – which will pay off in retention.

Now is the time to deepen relationships and partnerships with promoters

Guneet Singh, Director of Customer Experience programs at Docusign, spoke about this in a recent Voice of the Customer webinar. He looks for champions among his promoters who have a common pain point, and then brings them together in councils that engage with DocuSign’s product team. Through this customer advocacy program, his customers learn from each other, get a first look at new product features, and provide valuable insights for the DocuSign product development roadmap.

How do you begin a customer advocacy program like this? Pay attention to customer requests and “start with small wins,” says Guneet. “If you complete the feature that a customer asks for, by listening and acting on their words, you’ve won that customer for life.” 

We couldn’t agree more!

The most valuable commitment we have is to our customers. And as much as we work to grow, to scale, to expand — it’s times like these where we have to remember to appreciate the people who already support us and show them support too. We’re all in this together.