Why is balancing qualitative and quantitative information important to an effective Customer Success (CS) function?

Revenue-driven metrics don’t show the whole picture – quantitative data is essential but must be contextualized by a more holistic view of the CS function’s overall performance. Teams that rely purely on quantitative metrics aren’t integrating all available information into their decision-making process, and therefore can’t fully understand how the customer will be impacted. 

Supplementing data with qualitative insights can have a quantitative impact – this is especially true for the customer experience. Relationship management can create opportunities or friction during the post-sale journey, and therefore affects important metrics like customer lifetime value. 

Quantitative and qualitative information helps in two key interactions: Account expansion and retention – qualitative insights balanced with quantifying value for the customer, can have the greatest impact when you seek to expand a strategic account or improve customer retention. Taking a people-first approach to managing key relationships makes it easier to unlock upside opportunities and reduce churn.

Building a Balanced Team 

Why should you consider balancing quantitative and qualitative skillsets when hiring for Customer Success roles?

Well-rounded teams perform better – aim to build a team that has a mix of people with high emotional intelligence and people with strong data analysis skills. Teams that benefit from different skillsets and perspectives are more successful in the long term. 

High-functioning teams value learning – when team members actively seek to learn from others with different strengths, the potential of the team as a whole increases. Company cultures should encourage an open mindset that recognizes and celebrates the diversity of strengths across its employees.

When hiring, how do you evaluate whether a candidate has strong emotional intuition?

Evaluation Method	Notes
1. Leverage your Leader’s intuition	Leaders often have an innate ability to read the room and determine whether somebody else has strong people skills. If the interviewer doesn’t have this ability, ask a teammate to participate in the interviewing process and/or use methods 2 and 3.
2. Evaluate their self-awareness	Ask if the candidate has invested in any personal or professional development for themselves. Personal calibration indicates self-awareness, which is the gateway to having strong emotional intelligence. Self-aware individuals understand their strengths and weaknesses, and know how to pick up on these factors when working with others.
3. References	Ask the candidate’s former bosses, clients, or customers to share stories about how they developed relationships, how they built trust, and how they worked with their team members. Comparing the candidate’s answers to the same questions can also help you evaluate their self-awareness.

What are signs that a team is leaning too far into metrics vs too far into intuitive/qualitative insights?

Signs that a team is metrics-heavy	Signs that a team is intuition-heavy
• CS team members use their status time to review reporting metrics without context about the customer relationship, recent conversations or contextual learnings about the client organization. • Surprise churn: teams that over-rely on metrics often don’t discover that a problem is brewing or a change in the client organization is coming until it causes an increase in churn.	• Weekly team meetings are light on metrics that help you understand performance and the objective value (ROI) you bring to the customer. • Limited growth of strategic accounts: intuition-heavy teams can inadvertently stunt account growth by not leveraging metrics enough when they manage the relationship

What are the key characteristics of emotional intelligence?

Characteristic	Definition
Active Listening	This is a crucial opportunity to truly understand the customer’s pain points, document them, and share them with the larger team. Active listening involves repeating the customer’s feedback back to make sure you understand them properly.  Note: customer-facing teams should spend significantly more time listening than talking. Customers and clients value being heard and their pain validated.
Empathy	Leading with empathy in customer conversations helps de-escalate stressful situations and enables better understanding of the customer’s needs.  Note: This strengthens the relationship and trust with the customer or client.  They feel a more human connection, not just a relationship based on business and selling.
Self-Awareness / Reading the Room	A lack of self-awareness is a barrier to emotional intelligence, so it’s important to hire people who already display self-awareness or to have a plan to help them develop it.

What can leaders do to incorporate intuition into their organizations?

Lead by example – any leaders who interact with customers (Chief Customer Officer, Head of CS, Head of Account Management, etc) should model how to build authentic relationships during customer meetings. They should also consistently demonstrate how to leverage both emotional intuition and quantitative data when discussing performance and account strategy in internal meetings.  

Create a forum for qualitative discussion – establishing a respected, consistent space for the Customer Success team to report qualitative insights and anecdotes on top of key quantitative measurements, reinforces the importance of intuitive data. This also gives your team an opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences.

Reward intuitive thinking and problem-solving – Find a way to incentivize employees to develop and utilize interpersonal skills. Companies should reward employees who exhibit strong intuition in addition to employees who hit their quantitative metrics. This could be a monthly gift card or an employee recognition program, or broader exposure and leadership opportunity

Invest in intuition training – dedicate a budget that teams can use to attend intuition training modules and workshops. Offer an emotional intelligence development program as another opportunity to pursue professional development.

How can CSMs create more connections and touch points with your customers?

Successful relationships are authentic and unique – it’s impossible to take a prescriptive approach to building a relationship. Talented relationship builders make connections naturally, and structuring your day-to-day to increase the number of opportunities you have to interact with your customers helps develop relationships in an organic way.

Encourage daily caring connections – customer success managers should be the daily point of contact for their customers. Having a regular cadence of check-ins where you ask genuine, open-ended questions encourages your customer to reach out and makes your relationship feel less transactional.

Connect as individuals – get to know your customer as a person instead of as a part of a company. This will allow you to have greater empathy, and will strengthen your relationship beyond sales and trouble-shooting. 

Prioritize in-person interactions – if the customer is comfortable with it, give them opportunities to have meetings in person and connect face-to-face in a more personal setting. Offer to take them to lunch, dinner, or coffee. In-person interactions allow for more spontaneous connections and make it easier to build rapport.

Leveraging Data In CS

What are the most important CS metrics?

Choose metrics with purpose – tracking more metrics isn’t necessarily better. Keep your team’s priorities clear by only focusing on metrics that actually matter. Don’t fall into the distraction of tracking metrics for the sake of tracking metrics.

Metrics you can consider include:

• ROI (for the customer) – The CS team member should always have an updated business case on the value the customer is getting, from the solution they purchased.  This starts in Sales.  This business case should show the return they are getting on their initial investment, with real data.  Having this information and sharing it regularly with the customer, will fuel smoother renewals and lay a foundation for expansion.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is important but reactive – NPS alone can’t give a full picture of customer satisfaction because surveys always have a lag. Pair it with more immediate metrics (and qualitative data) to get a clearer picture of how your customers are feeling.
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR) evaluates revenue risk and opportunity – NRR gives a comprehensive read on retention by reflecting both revenue upside from upsell and churn. This is one of the most powerful metrics a CS team should be tracking. 
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) helps you allocate resources – use CLTV (customer lifetime value) to segment customers based on how valuable they are to your brand and business. Investing in a higher, more consultative level of service for your most valuable customers can unlock incremental revenue.  
• Overall Health Score (OHS) is a metric you can incorporate qualitative data through – OHS can provide a comprehensive view of each customer relationship by incorporating both quantitative data and qualitative analysis. Diligently track both types of information to avoid missing potential problems or opportunities that should be obvious. For example, a relationship might look healthy based on quantitative data, but conversational insights from CS managers can reveal underlying risks or issues.

Metrics are only valuable if they’re accurate – data is useless if you aren’t tracking the right metrics or if you aren’t set up to track them consistently. Ensure that you’re prepared to accurately track data before you begin reporting on it.

How do you reconcile signals that contradict one another? What do you do when a key customer success metric contradicts the emotional intelligence information you’re receiving?

Lean in when metrics and emotional data misalign – as with any type of data, misaligned metrics indicate that a case deserves closer examination. Something is probably going on under the surface, and this is a critical opportunity for your customer team to be proactive and understand the situation before it becomes serious. 

Pay close attention to contradicting signals during implementation – emotional data and metrics are often in conflict during the implementation phase. This is an important opportunity for your customer team to provide reassurance, regular communication, and support to help alleviate the concerns that are an inevitable part of any implementation.

Capture and Leveraging Customer Insights

How should leaders empower day-to-day operators like CSMs to collect and act on qualitative insights?

Gauge current capabilities – every team is different, and new skills require time and effort to develop. Understand whether your team’s strengths lie in quantitative or qualitative insights, and hire and/or upskill accordingly to compensate. 

Develop qualitative skills through hands-on coaching – team members with lighter EQ skills can learn by example. Leaders should set the tone in initial customer meetings, with a goal of empowering their team members to have increased autonomy and ownership of the customer relationship over time. 

Higher EQ team members benefit from a guardrail, not a coach – leaders can best support team members with strong people skills by acting as a strategic safety net to correct the direction of relationships instead of being involved with every major touchpoint. This allows your team to build stronger relationships while freeing up the leader to focus on department-wide, big-picture initiatives. 

Integrate an EQ platform with traditional metrics – the upside from your largest customers is stunted if you don’t have a way to make qualitative and quantitative insights work together. EQ becomes a significant unlock for account growth and can take a customer’s CLTV to the next level. Intentional investment in EQ and authentic relationship skills also improve the value you derive from metrics by helping your team think more holistically.

What are the most important questions that Customer Success Managers should ask during QBRs?

Question category	What this tells you		Specific questions to ask
Goals	• Context for your contact’s place in the organization and personal goals • What the customer values / what their strategic objectives are • How you can help them, and how you can position your results in future conversations		• What are you trying to achieve in the next 6 months? Year? 2 years? 3 years?  • What critical milestones does your organization need to reach? • What does management measure you on?
Pain points	• What is causing stress for your contact and your customer Note: this also shows your customer that you care.		• What are key operational pain points?  • What are key cross-functional pain points, both across departments and up or down in the organizational hierarchy • What pain points do you experience on a daily basis?
Cross-functional collaboration	• How you can facilitate cross-functional dialogue • Opportunities for the client to work through pain points and unlock new perspectives on goals and new solutions		• What business units do you work with most regularly?  • Who do you rarely work with?  • Who did you think you could work with more regularly?  • What are strengths and weaknesses in your current processes?

How do you incorporate qualitative insights into your conversations going into renewal? What kinds of touchpoints should you have?

Healthy relationships make renewal conversations easy – if you and your customer have good communication and regular check-ins throughout the year, renewal should feel more like an organic development than a major conversation. 

Effective QBRs follow a three-step process – by making your customer feel valued and understood, QBRs (quarterly business reviews) strengthen your relationship and create an opportunity to set the tone for future partnership.

Steps	Goals
Step 1: “I heard you.”	Build trust – and demonstrate that you listened to your customer’s evolving needs by recapping key points of feedback your customer shared throughout the last quarter. Don’t shy away from their pain points.
Step 2: “Because I heard you, this is what we’re doing.”	Build credibility – by showing how you’ve taken their feedback into account so that you can better address their needs going forward. Explain any updates that have occurred, and how those updates help your customer.
Step 3: “Here’s how things will change going forward because of these inputs.”	Explain how your partnership will help your customer – reach the new goals that they’ve identified for the upcoming quarter. This also helps you confirm that you and your customer are on the stage page about priorities going forward.

How can qualitative insights and relationship-building drive account expansion?

Strong relationships reveal whitespace opportunities – customers speak more freely around people they interact with more frequently. Customer Success managers have access to more information around a customer’s internal processes, goals, pain points, and team dynamics than a sales representative whose role is primarily transactional. 

Account strategies rely on strong communication – the entire customer-facing team must share information and act as a unit to implement account strategies. The team should also be in lockstep with all key customer stakeholders to encourage customers to view them as partners instead of vendors.  

Overall

What are common pitfalls?

QBRs shouldn’t be used as a crutch – if you have effective, regular touchpoints with your customer, you should already know the answers to most of the questions that are usually reserved for QBRs. QBRs should be more of a formality, not a way to postpone having important conversations. 

Customer teams might not realize how quickly customer needs change – customer pain points and goals should be constantly evolving. If you rely too heavily on QBRs to check in on priorities, you risk operating based on outdated information and falling out of sync with your customers. Use past goals and pain points as a starting point to initiate regular conversations about customer needs. 

Not thinking of Customer Success Managers as salespeople – some organizations compensate CSMs like salespeople. As the main face of the relationship with the customer, this role has incredible influence over account performance and has the potential to unlock new opportunities if they’re given the tools and internal influence to do so.