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| Part of [[The Playbook]]. [[Observability (Customer Health Scoring)|A health score]] tells you an account's state. An SLO (service level objective) tells you what state you actually promised to deliver — a measurable target, not a vibe. Borrowed straight from infrastructure: an SRE doesn't say "the site should be pretty reliable," they say "99.9% uptime, measured monthly, with an error budget." Customer Success needs the same discipline.
| | #REDIRECT [[Renew]] |
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| ==Set targets, not aspirations==
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| Vague goals ("delight the customer," "drive adoption") aren't SLOs — they can't be measured or missed. Real SLO candidates:
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| * '''Time-to-first-value''' — days from contract signature to the customer hitting a defined "aha" milestone, not just "onboarding complete."
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| * '''Adoption depth by day 90''' — percentage of licensed seats or core workflows actively used, measured against a stated target, not just "some usage."
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| * '''Net Revenue Retention (NRR)''' — [(starting recurring revenue + expansion − contraction − churn) ÷ starting recurring revenue] × 100. The 2025 SaaS Capital benchmark for private B2B SaaS at $25–50K ACV: median 102%, top quartile 111%.
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| * '''Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)''' — the same formula without expansion in the numerator, so it can never exceed 100%. This is where a leaky base shows up even when a few big upsells are making NRR look fine. 95%+ is the generally accepted healthy floor.
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| GRR and NRR are reported side by side on purpose: a strong NRR built on expansion inside a shrinking base is a warning sign the top-line number hides.
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| ==Segment your SLOs — one target does not fit every tier==
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| An enterprise account with a named CSM, a technical champion, and a six-figure contract should have a tighter, higher target and more play intensity than a self-serve SMB account managed at scale. Setting one SLO across every tier either starves your top accounts of attention or burns your team chasing SMB accounts to a standard they were never priced to receive.
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| ==The error budget idea, applied to CS==
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| In SRE, the error budget is the amount of unreliability you're allowed to spend before you have to stop shipping features and fix reliability instead. The CS equivalent: how much acceptable churn/contraction risk exists in the base before the team throttles new logo onboarding intake or expansion pushes and redirects capacity to shoring up existing accounts. Most CS orgs never make this trade-off explicit — they just let the at-risk accounts pile up quietly while chasing this quarter's expansion number. Naming the budget forces the conversation before it becomes a crisis.
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| ==Where this feeds==
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| SLO misses are what should trigger a [[The Play Library|play]] proactively, not just a reactive health-score dip. A pattern of SLO misses across a segment is a [[The Postmortem (Churn and Save Retros)|postmortem]]-worthy signal even before any single account churns.
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| [[Category:Customer Success Manager]]
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| [[Category:Technical Account Manager]]
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