The need to measure product utilization and/or subscription consumption is a no-brainer. Usage metrics are critical indicators of how well your products are helping customers achieve their desired outcomes, which in turn influences your customer retention strategy. If usage is low, odds are that your customer sees little if any value in your solution. And no value realization often equals no subscription renewal.
What’s not so straightforward is how to measure these activities and what to do to prevent problems. ESG CEO, Michael Harnum, recently asked the members of the Customer Success Forum for advice on measuring subscription consumption and creating plays to manage issues proactively. His request provoked a lot of exciting ideas that could be replicated. Below are three examples worth sharing.
I’ve also tagged the comments with the names of their creator, in case you’re interested in following these folks on LinkedIn. Some posts have been edited for length or clarity.
Pivoting for proactive customer success
“At my previous company, measuring utilization was a manual process by downloading the raw data and creating pivot tables to look at usage. I found an unengaged recruiting client was using a tiny percentage of their seats. Based on the pivot tables, I ascertained who the highest/medium/low engaged users were and created 10 questions to ask them. I scheduled one-on-one conversations with them or emailed them the questions. I then presented my findings during a scheduled Year End Review (which the sponsor accepted because he wanted to know how employees were utilizing the software). I presented suggested solutions, including global custom training and webinars, which I invited the most engaged users to. I encouraged these users by explaining that they’d be recognized as an expert who could add value to their organization by answering questions and showing how they use the platform. Needless to say, we secured the renewal!”
Analytics in the product is the answer
“To get ahead of the consumption measurement game, the trick is to have analytics built into the product/service, so that you actually have real data to leverage. The analytics need to align not only with how you price and sell the subscription service, but also key measures of adoption. For example, it’s probably not just the number of users logging into the service that is important, but also some measures of usage like the number of files uploaded, the number of workflows initiated, the number of sites created, that kind of thing. If your pricing strategy changes, then the analytics in the product needs to change, too. That’s really the best. Everything else is just a substitute for having good analytics in the product.”
Leverage general performance requirements
“A simple measure to start would be CPU, hard disk space, and networking on the production image. These metrics are usually already gathered for general performance requirements. Build from there. Some coding may be required to call a logging function when a function (feature) is called and executed. I would argue this is part of your engineering team’s design specs once a level of maturity has been reached. But you can gather heaps of information and then push that data through a dashboard using one of the many analytics tools out there. Segmenting this data by the user (LDAP logins) /customer is just the next stage to get robust measurements.”