Customer Success Roundup: 28th October 2016

Akita’s Customer Success Roundup is a list of hand-picked resources from around the web brought to your inbox. We’ve enjoyed reading them and we hope you do too.

Ryan Law of Cobloom has compiled an extensive guide to the 50 most important SaaS metrics broken down by Growth, Marketing, Sales and, of course, Customer Success.

Bernadette Forward and Betty Chung, both the first Customer Success hires at their separate startups, discuss how they made Customer Success practices work for their early stage businesses in “4 Recipes for Customer Success: Developed for Big Teams, Reworked for Us”.

Andrea Saez of ProdPad provides some great tips for replying to customer queries and requests when the knee-jerk answer is “no” in this blog post.

Jaded by the myriad of “vague” churn busting articles out there, Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, sets out to give practical real-world solutions to addressing a high churn rate in “Beyond Buzzwords – How to Win the Churn Battle”.

McKenzie Ingram of Act-On discusses just how easy it is to calculate a basic Customer Lifetime Value and why it is a vital metric for any company in “How, And Why, You Should Calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)”.

Karla Cook of HubSpot identifies some common onboarding pitfalls to avoid if you want to keep that hard-won customer in “6 Client Onboarding Mistakes That Ruin Relationships Before They Start”.

Danni Friedland of Jaco interviews some CSMs and delves into their responses to answer the question “What Does Customer Success Manager Actually Do?”.

Delight your customers by following these six “Best Customer Loyalty Practices” outlined by Rohan Ayyar of LiveChat. We especially love #1!

Dana Severson of Promoter.io presents “The Anatomy of a Customer” in Infographic form, which shows the characteristics that typically describe your Passive, Promoter and Detractor customers and what they mean to your business.