This document discusses how customer benchmarking can be used by customer success organizations to improve customer outcomes. It argues that customer benchmarking, when done regularly using automated tools, can provide unique insights to customers on how they compare to their peers. This allows customer success managers to have more strategic conversations with customers about improvement opportunities. The document provides examples of benchmarking metrics and insights that can be uncovered. It claims regular benchmarking can help customers improve and lead to better outcomes, more value delivered, and stronger customer relationships and retention.

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Customer Benchmarking:
The Next Foundational Activity of
Customer Success Organizations

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Jim Berardone
•Chief Customer Officer @ OnlyBoth
•Product Management was my passion; now, it’s Customer
Success
•Teach customer-centric product management to master’s
students at Carnegie Mellon University
•Let’s connect! in/JimBerardone @JimBerardone
www.OnlyBoth.com

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Some companies who benchmark customers
TSIA: 25.6% of survey respondents said they do
customer benchmarking in their CS organizations.
Source: Research findings of Technology Services Industry Association
presented by Peter Armaly at Customer Success Summit 2016

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What you’ll gain today
1. Learn how customer benchmarking increases customer engagement and
improves outcomes for your customers and your business
2. Takeaway ideas to start using customer benchmarking with your
customers
3. Discover why you want to benchmark more than KPIs for your customers
4. Understand why Artificial Intelligence-based automation can help you to
be a better Customer Success Manager

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Your customers are constantly striving to
improve their business outcomes
CompetitivenessGrowth

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Your customers need to improve in many
underlying ways to get better business
outcomes
InteractionsSkillsMeasures
Processes Practices Tools
Customer
Business
Outcomes
This means YOUR
CUSTOMERS
have to improve
the value they get
from YOUR
SOLUTIONS and
RELATIONSHIP
with them.

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Your customers need to answer 4 core questions
to identify improvement opportunities
Compared to your other
customers…
1. Where could we improve?
2. What’s best-in-class?
3. What’s changing?
4. Where are we doing well?

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And, you have the answers in your data!
Only your company has this data – a rich source of action-provoking, comparative insights
You have data that is a
by-product of your
customers’ use of your
products, services, and
programs.
2 You have data about
the relationship you
have with each
customer
3You have many
customers who use
the same solutions
for similar business
reasons
1

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A ‘typical’ benchmarking view of a customer
Example: Buzzster –Corp (HR Suite Customer)
Customer
Outcomes
“KPIs”
Peer Group = Large-sized Customers
Best Practice: Use metrics that reflect the outcomes customers
want to achieve and the value to the customer while using your
solutions.

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Use different peer groups to get
different perspectives Peer Group = Customers in Adopting Stage
Example: Buzzster Corp. (HR Suite Customer)
Commonly Used
Peer Groups:
• Customer Size
• Industry
• Segment
• Region
• Journey Stage
• Customer Tier
Best Practice: Automatically compute the most similar peers using data
for many attributes of your customers. The comparative insights and data
will be more persuasive.

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Identify where the customer could improve
Peer Group = Customers in Adopting StageExample: Buzzster Corp. (HR Suite Customer)
Engage Buzzster during a QBR or Annual Review to set an improved, realistic goal
by considering what other similar customers have achieved, like the Average of
18.8%.
1) Diagnose why Buzzster is way below the average, (e.g. Are there specific users who are
decreasing the average?) 2) Proactively reach out to customer to discuss. 3) Recommend
actions to improve, (e.g. Ask their best users to share what they do with the laggards.) This
could lead to a better outcome for high-performer turnover rate, too.
Best Practice: Focus on the customer’s most distinctive differences versus
other customers as these are more action-provoking.

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There are many more distinctive comparative insights in
your data, which you wouldn’t find with tables and charts.
Best Practice: Analyze more underlying metrics and more ways customers are similar to uncover
more unique comparative insights in your data.
Buzzster Corp. trained the 4th-fewest users
on HR Suite (43%) among the 28 customers
that are in the adopting stage, are large-
sized businesses and in the Banking industry.
That 43% compares to an average of 54.8%
across the 28 customers.
Only Buzzster Corp. has both as few
monthly uses of the career planning tool per
user (3.3) and trained as few users (43%).

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Automation makes finding many more
comparative insights easy and scalable
•Specialized benchmarking software automates the data analysis, insight
discovery and reporting
•Game changes from fishing for insights to selecting insights for one’s attention
•More insights generated brings on the need for automated ranking of insights
•Creates opportunities to group the insights in many ways to help different
stakeholders prioritize their attention across multiple customers
Best Practice: Prioritize comparative insights for attention by considering the
importance of the customer and the significance of the insight.

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Results from doing customer benchmarking
regularly
• More value
delivered to
customers
• More
strategic
conversations
• More actions
taken by
customers to
improve
• Better
outcomes
• More valued
relationships
Customer’s
Results:
• Retain and
grow
more
customers
Vendor’s
Results:
CSM’s
Results:

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You can learn more about customer
benchmarking by…
Reading our blog posts, published
articles and whitepapers
Visiting our booth
blog.onlyboth.com
HBR: Smart Benchmarking Starts with Knowing Whom to Compare
Yourself To
TechCrunch: Machine Learning vs. Machine Discovery
insideBIGDATA: Fencemarking vs. Benchmarking

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Takeaways
1. Start using customer benchmarking with your data for your next QBR and
you’ll deliver unique, personalized insights that customers want to know
2. Automation makes it possible for CSMs to use customer benchmarking
regularly and easily
• with each key customer
• in every QBR meeting
• with proactive outreaches
• in internal business review meetings
3. CSMs will spend more time guiding customers to improve and less time
looking for insights to engage customers

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THANK YOU
success.onlyboth.com