Customer success OKRs: real examples, explained

This is an interesting one. Many times, customer success teams focus on support NPS, response time, or similar. Here it's clear that strategy is involved in this decision, and they're really contributing to a very specific part by focusing on creating recommendations and reviews. I think there's room here for a lot more clarity, however, in the key results. What is a referenceable customer? It probably has an internal definition that should be spelled out there: customers we can ask to support our sales process, for example. Same with the review-site reviews. For clarity in the team, it could almost spell out exactly which review site we are targeting. It would be sharper, and it's much easier to direct effort toward one review site than trying to get reviews in general.

Naturally, add that the reviews should be positive.

This has strong focus for the team, depending on context. If this is a single OKR for the team, to really be able to focus on long-term churn, it's great for creating focus. Key result 1 is unclear from outside the team and might then be unclear inside the team too, in what it actually says. It doesn't define what the current health score is. What would be better is a clear "take them from X to Y", or a variation of this.

There is room for a third key result here to create even more clarity on how the team is approaching this strategic objective. I would say it's almost there, but it needs some adjustment.

Ambitious, and trying to attack the first days of the customer experience from several angles. The main feedback is that it is focused on the first part of the customer journey, but that is still a very broad focus. Each of these individual key results probably has more than a quarter's work in it to really make it move, depending on resources of course. There are also a couple of built-in definitions here: first value milestone, onboarding completion, core module. In cases like this it is extremely important that the team already knows exactly what those mean, so they can work efficiently toward the OKR.

The core improvement would be to take one of the key results and make that the objective, for example get new customers to value quickly through the core module, and then break down two to four key results from that.