How to Measure CS Ops

These are the core tenets that I’ve picked up about how to measure the effectiveness of a CS Ops team. How do you measure your CS Ops team’s success?

Team Throughput

It starts with tracking simple CS Ops activity. You can use some metric like features deployed. Since a large portion of our CS Ops team uses sprints, we can show "points delivered". @kendra_mcclanahan (Gainsight’s Director of CS Ops) has even built mechanisms in Monday.com so that those points are compared against expected vs. actual, and are reported broken down by high-level strategic initiatives and major areas of run-the-business responsibilities.

Leading Indicators of Impact

You’ll then want to start to collect signs that your CS Ops team is actually starting to make a difference. For example, @jennifer_bruno (Gainsight’s leader of CS Enablement & Transformation) runs a survey of our CSMs about how enabled they feel, how useful our health scores are, and so on. She coordinates with the rest of CS Ops about what areas of impact we want to track. You might even have leading indicators that are related to specific projects. For example, if a short-term initiative is to improve new CSM onboarding, you might, for a period of time, track how soon those CSMs have a first strategy-alignment call with customer decisionmakers.

Lagging Outcomes

CS Ops is essentially targeted at improving 4 things:

• CS efficiency (account ratios)
• Retention rate (GRR)
• Expansion rate (NRR),
• Advocacy (new logo $$$ influenced)
• Every CS Ops team has different focuses, and a given team's focus will change over time, depending on the company's strategic priorities. For example, if you acquire a new company, “CS efficiency” could jump from being last priority to first, in a heartbeat.

The best way I've heard to measure lagging outcomes is by comparing cohorts against each other. Keeping with the example of before, if you embarked on new CSM onboarding improvements because you felt like that was the biggest reason that your retention was struggling, then you can track the retention rate of customers owned by the CSMs who went through that program, versus the CSMs who did not. Or, in the case of my own work on community-building (since I sit within our broader CS Ops team), I’m working to pull together data on retention, expansion, and so on of customers who engage in our community, versus those who don’t.