On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at Chili Piper about what metrics are important and how to report them correctly.
Gemma Cipriani-Espineira is an award-winning software executive, building and leads global customer teams with a focus on driving retention, product adoption, and customer advocacy. She believes that customer success is a way of doing business and is the fastest path to sustainable growth. Gemma is passionate about getting customer success a seat at the table and supports diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace.
Metrics are critical in customer success – especially when reporting to the leadership team. But often SaaS businesses are unsure on how and what to report. For example, when it comes to customer success, what does leadership want to know? And what are the metrics that really matter?
Gemma’s career acceleration in customer success has led her all the way to becoming the CCO at Chili Piper. And while there has definitely been an increase in the understanding of the role and responsibilities of a CCO, the position is still relatively new within the customer success space. Indeed, this is something Gemma wishes to help explain: “what does a CCO do?”
In our discussion Gemma answers the following questions:
- Metrics, this is something we hear often in CS leadership, but which metrics really matter to your board?
- CCO is a relatively new title in the CS space, it is exciting to see more CS leaders become CCOs, but what does a CCO do?
- Let’s talk about what you have to report to the board. How do you structure a board deck? How do you prep? What do you include?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- As a Chief Customer Officer, I’m effectively the owner of the customer journey. So, I have to be the glue that ensures that we’re telling prospects ahead of time, the right expectations, and setting people up for success
- The CCO comes with a lot of responsibilities – including tasks such as analyzing metrics and reporting back to the board
- The most important number is net revenue retention (NRR). Are you making more money out of the customers that were with you a year ago?
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!