Product Activity Coefficient: A single metric to drive customer success teams

Arguably, the activity does not always correlate with user happiness.<p>I don&#x27;t want to be because of actively using the software. I want to be happy because the software solves some kind of problem, efficiently. There is fine difference.<p>Games: make me happy through the act of using them.<p>Accounting software: I don&#x27;t want to be forced to use it constantly. My idea of happiness would be to get it done with as little effort on my part, as infrequently as possible.<p>Extreme example: LinkedIn requiring users to log in every month or be prioritized down in searches. That would increase how frequently users log in but I doubt anybody would agree that this would improve user happiness.

Happiness isn’t the cornerstone of customer success. A customer can feel unhappy with a product due to many factors but can still use the product to meet and achieve goals. Thus becoming successful. Unhappiness does not necessarily effect churn rates. A customer can be unhappy with their usage but still see value in the product and not churn.<p>Usage is a hard metric to measure because it can be very subjective. Some users subscribe to a product for a once a year event while others can be hyper users with thousands of sessions. Both can feel the same level of success. The cornerstone of Customer Success is the manager, they are there to help the product meet the goals of the subscriber. The true metric should be: did the manager assess the customers needs, and meet their objectives while achieving a short time to value? That would be a better metric...though hard to measure.

What are Customer Success teams? Phone support? Cold sales?

Maximizing time the users spent in your software must not trump general design sense—just remember the (sometimes devastating) effects of YouTube’s switch to maximizing the time users spend watching videos.<p>While for an ad-supported product like Google’s video sharing platform it might be an unavoidable tough trade-off in order to not be a loss leader, but a paid product should aim to solve user’s problem most efficiently and <i>give</i> them time, not take away from it.

Obligatory HN-level nitpick: &quot;coefficient&quot; seems misplaced. It <i>usually</i> means &quot;some number that gets multiplied with a named variable&quot;.<p>So I&#x27;d expect something like &quot;synergy * hypergrowth * mrr_arr_all_the_rrs_me_hearties * activity * activity_coefficient&quot;.