Sometimes my head gets foggy. There’s a cloud that doesn’t go away. It can’t go away if you live, eat and breathe in the cloud, especially as you earn frequent flyer miles to make your customers happy.

There is nothing more important if you are responsible for product adoption by customers. How do you measure customer success when it comes to product adoption?

1. 100% of purchased software licenses are deployed. It’s a troubling sign if more than 10% of  licenses are not being used.
2. Usage metrics should be tracked on a daily basis (activities being performed such as log-ins, top users such as admins and superusers, top features being used, features not being used, executive usage). This data should be available to your customers so they can manage their accounts. These metrics can be culled from your BI tools or by purchasing a customer success tool. Here’s a good list from TrustRadius: CSM Tools
3. In-person training should be offered for large customers. Customized training should be readily available. Training must be performed to ensure proper adoption for major roll-outs and complex feature releases including product integrations.
4. Monthly Webinars should be offered for your SMB customers so new users can be onboarded. Some large customers will ask for best practice webinars.
5. A Product Roadmap landing page gives your customers assurance that they are being heard. Here’s a nice one from Trello: Sample Roadmap
6. 24×7 Support is a requirement if you want to ensure customer needs are being met worldwide. Product adoption begins and ends with multi-channel live support.
7. A customer success manager (CSM) should be assigned to key accounts. This ‘people person’ is a trusted advisor and coach for capturing the pulse of customers. CSMs should have monthly touch-points with customers. There is much debate if CSMs should be quota-carrying “account farmers” or if they should be product-heavy consultants with a focus on best practices.  Your product complexity, along with customer use cases should dictate the type of CSMs you’ll need. Some customers prefer relationship managers, while others will want a dedicated support engineer. Here’s my own quadrant (based on experience) if your CSMs should be more Sales or Tech-oriented.