
Product Activity Coefficient: A single metric to drive customer success teams - borisjabes
https://blog.getcensus.com/a-single-metric-to-drive-customer-success-teams/
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lmilcin
Arguably, the activity does not always correlate with user happiness.

I don't want to be because of actively using the software. I want to be happy
because the software solves some kind of problem, efficiently. There is fine
difference.

Games: make me happy through the act of using them.

Accounting software: I don't want to be forced to use it constantly. My idea
of happiness would be to get it done with as little effort on my part, as
infrequently as possible.

Extreme example: LinkedIn requiring users to log in every month or be
prioritized down in searches. That would increase how frequently users log in
but I doubt anybody would agree that this would improve user happiness.

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1123581321
Per the article, the team would define activity, so presumably it should
include some core functions and not just clicking in frustration. Second, low
scores in this metric is designed to predict churn, which is a strong
indicator of value to that customer. The article doesn’t spell this out, but
if the activity is not predicting cancellations then it should be adjusted.

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RyanMathewson
Happiness isn’t the cornerstone of customer success. A customer can feel
unhappy with a product due to many factors but can still use the product to
meet and achieve goals. Thus becoming successful. Unhappiness does not
necessarily effect churn rates. A customer can be unhappy with their usage but
still see value in the product and not churn.

Usage is a hard metric to measure because it can be very subjective. Some
users subscribe to a product for a once a year event while others can be hyper
users with thousands of sessions. Both can feel the same level of success. The
cornerstone of Customer Success is the manager, they are there to help the
product meet the goals of the subscriber. The true metric should be: did the
manager assess the customers needs, and meet their objectives while achieving
a short time to value? That would be a better metric...though hard to measure.

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sam_lowry_
What are Customer Success teams? Phone support? Cold sales?

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klysm
The team that aims to make sure that people who are currently giving you
money, keep giving you money.

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goblin89
Maximizing time the users spent in your software must not trump general design
sense—just remember the (sometimes devastating) effects of YouTube’s switch to
maximizing the time users spend watching videos.

While for an ad-supported product like Google’s video sharing platform it
might be an unavoidable tough trade-off in order to not be a loss leader, but
a paid product should aim to solve user’s problem most efficiently and _give_
them time, not take away from it.

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jacques_chester
Obligatory HN-level nitpick: "coefficient" seems misplaced. It _usually_ means
"some number that gets multiplied with a named variable".

So I'd expect something like "synergy * hypergrowth *
mrr_arr_all_the_rrs_me_hearties * activity * activity_coefficient".

