Customer success metrics are torture. They’re 50 shades of pain. They’re also essential.

Do you have customers who are not really using your app but paying you? What happens if you send out metrics showing them all exactly how much they use it and who does not need it. They’ll unsubscribe and that’s the best thing ever. A good set of customer success metrics will change your outlook and while the short term is torture, it becomes the greatest relief.

Deep down inside we knew that some people did not really need Upscope in the long term.

Upscope is co-browsing aka instant screen sharing for live chat and phone support / sales.

Does everyone with software need it? No. It’s best used for onboarding new users and dealing with tough customer support issues for software which has users who are non-tech.

It’s not always clear who is a good fit customer

We avoid bad-fit customers but the companies that seem like a good fit sometimes end up not needing it and it takes time for that realisation to come about.

We sent an email out to all our customers giving them a breakdown of how much they were really using Upscope.

What do you think would happen?

Of course they would unsubscribe

I knew what would happen when we sent out an email telling them about their usage.

I thought it would hurt when some unsubscribed but the pain was all before the email, afterwards it felt great.

Some companies used it an incredible amount, one company had not used it at all in the last month and when they unsubscribed, I felt better.

Having a company sitting there paying but not using our product was a false positive for our revenue. It was a distraction. It was also embarrassing.

It’s shameful thinking that we’re getting paid for something someone is not using. There’s no love there from either side. It’s an empty relationship. It’s dead inside.

We can focus more on our real market

It’s the classic rule “See who needs your product the most and find more like them”.

The problem with this?

Some of the people who signed up and paid did not really need it as much as they imagined so the push for real customer success metrics help us understand who really does.

We’re now analysing the people using it the most and ‘the obvious’ that was not so obvious is becoming obvious.

People with non-tech users dealing with complicated software? Winner.

Even tech savvy people need to be onboarded for some tools and so a company that uses Upscope for demonstrations and guiding people through the site? Winner.

We’re still combing through it. I’ll update this in time as we understand more but now it’s data driven from the ground up and not ‘Hey, this person signed up, they must love it, wow, they do X… we need to find more of these guys’.

Related: The danger of bad fit customers

Also see: 27 companies show you their best onboarding emails.