Why engagement score is the most important metric to evaluate the success of your customer success efforts

When we hire a customer success professional, what are the qualities we look for? Do we look for qualities like (1) Number of emails typed in a day? (2) Number of phone calls made in a day? (3) Number of meetings moderated and handled in a day? (4) Number of hours spent making calls and writing emails?

NOT REALLY, none of the above. While communication skills are at the top of the list, we are only interested in the qualitative aspect of the communication and not quantitative. Therefore it only makes sense that the metric used to evaluate the performance of a customer success professional or the team be quantitative and not qualitative.

Strangely, if we look at customer success or sales platforms out in the market, most of them use a quantitative metric. For example, poeple.ai uses the number of hours spent communicating with the prospect as a way to measure your top performer. They advocate using the number of hours spent as a way to evaluate even your accounts and opportunities. Salesforce can report the number of activities (calls, emails, meetings), which is even more rudimentary. Clari, which started as a convenience tool over salesforce.com, uses a similar concept. Gong.ai goes a bit deep and used time spent talking vs. listening in a conference call as a way to come up with a performance metric.

Same is true for evaluating your customer. Most platforms like Gainsight or strike deck uses quantitative metrics to build customer health score. The fact that qualitative metric is much better is not rocket science. However, the reason most sales and customer success platforms are not able to go past quantitative metrics is because it’s extremely difficult to build a qualitative metric. It requires a human mind like intelligence to do so, and so many companies choose to do it manually and use humans (CSM managers) as a way to measure success. But in this day and age, that’s too expensive and not real-time.

To build a qualitative metric like engagement score for customer success and sales, one will have to map all communication (email, calendar, slack, zoom meetings, etc.) to the accounts and opportunity. Then they will have to use ML to mine these communication and come up with positives and negative metrics. Then they will have to use AI to design some sort of a weighted sum to come up with an engagement score. That is precisely what boostup has done.

Checkout BoostUp engagement score by emailing demo@boostup.ai or ask the team to run the platform in silent mode in your environment and calculate the engagement score for all of your customers. I bet you will be amazed by the results. Like Sharad Verma, the co-founder of BoostUp says, “Predictable engagement is equal to predictable revenue.” I wish you all a very predictable revenue for 2020!