The Evolution of Customer Success - with You Mon Tsang, Founder and CEO ChurnZero

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by You Mon Tsang, the founder and CEO of ChurnZero. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with You Mon. First, how the role of customer success has evolved over the past 12 to 24 months. Second, what are some of the measurements or metrics used to determine the ROI on customer success, and have they evolved over time? And third, the top three performance metrics that You Mon recommends for customer success, including those he uses at his own company, ChurnZero. You Mon, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**You Mon Tsang** (1:21)
Yeah, I will. But first, Ray, thank you for having me. Just honored to be a guest on this podcast. Love Metrics, so I'm happy to talk about Metrics. My journey is actually full of Metrics. This is my fourth company. I'm a repeat entrepreneur. When I started in tech, I actually started in what was called decision support at that time. I don't even remember that term way back when. Then that evolved to business intelligence, and then it was called analytics.
It's just a real passion of mine over the decades I've been in this business. Most recently, I moved into the marketing side, marketing metrics, marketing automation, and then the last thing, the thing I'm doing now is ChurnZero, where I moved over from the marketing automation side over to customer success. There's a lot of overlap. There's a lot of workflow, a lot of reporting, a lot of metrics, and that's how I got here.

**Ray Rike** (2:19)
Well, it's funny. You said, Brio, I've been around the industry for quite a while, and I used to have a good friend of mine who was the VP of Sales there, Michael Nason. I don't know if you knew Michael.

**You Mon Tsang** (2:29)
Mike, I don't know. Maybe it was after my time. I was employee number 13 over there at Brio Technology, so I was there very early.

**Ray Rike** (2:35)
I think he came afterwards because you were there in the late 90s. He was in the early 2000s. He took over as VP of Sales. Well, a lot of marketing analytics, marketing automation, but what was the vision or callous behind founding ChurnZero, a different market segment of customer success?

**You Mon Tsang** (2:55)
Yeah. So my previous company, my third company was acquired by a much larger company. So this is a company that was in marketing automation. It was a publicly traded company. I was running all the product. I was running all the marketing. And as a marketer, I had all this incredible technology. So those of you in marketing, you know, all the data in the world is really at your disposal and the technology is super advanced. I knew when people were clicking on the blog post I put up, they were reading the press releases I was putting out, you know, and then I knew exactly how to score them to send them over to sales at exactly the right time, right? So as the CMO, it was having, you know, mona like lots of technology. Well, actually, one day I became general manager and I inherited the customer success team. And of course, what technology do they have? Almost nothing, right? They had Salesforce, they had a telephone and they had an email. They're like, go get them, right? Go make the customers happy. And it just felt to me that it was really silly, right? Why would you put our worst technology on our most important asset, which is the customer? And so one of the things I did as a CMO was actually I called together a customer success workflow to help them. And it actually made a huge impact, right? There was workflow, there was insights, there was alerts. I was just hacking it together with technology I had, and it actually increased my retention rate by 15 percent.
And so that's, you know, as an entrepreneur, your head clicks and is like, that's real impact. Why isn't someone doing this at the scale that we ought to be doing it? And that was the reason I found the ChurnZero was to bring that best and breed technology to customer success.