Taking A Closer Look At Planned Quarterly Reviews

Planned Quarterly Reviews (or Quarterly Business Reviews) involve scheduled reviews between key customer stakeholders and the software vendor’s Customer Success Manager. The name suggests these reviews happen every quarter but frequency can vary according to the needs to the customer and at what phase the customer is in their subscription.

Essentially, the Quarterly Reviews are an opportunity to understand key questions such as how (1) the customer is getting on with the software, (2) identify any roadblocks or obstacles (3) ways to promote additional usage.

Below is a list of the main themes discussed during a Planned Quarterly Review:

1. How was the Implementation?

The first Quarterly Review will usually happen just after the customer has fully implemented the software and would consider themselves to be ‘up and running’. At this point, there will be a discussion on evaluating the implementation with questions asked such as “how have staff felt about the introduction of the software?” and “have you noticed an improvement in business efficiency?” etc. The key understanding that should be reached for the Customer Success Manager is if the software is adding immediate business value to the customer.

2. Any roadblocks/obstacles to success?

Identifying obstacles to use and growth is a crucial thing for both parties to identify at any point during the subscription. The Customer Success Manager should drive the discussion to a more strategic focus instead of day to day support issues which can be addressed outside of the review. For example, a customer may have business needs to better understand the data generated in the software. The Customer Success Manager in this instance can then look at ways to better meet this need, avoiding potentially bigger issues appearing down the road.

3. Results from previous 90 days?

This will be similar to the first review post implementation but the discussions at this stage should be a little more advanced. The focus should be on scaling the software out and seeing new opportunities to get more value and return on the investment.

4. What’s the ROI (Return on Investment)

This is the question customers want to know the answer to. Sometimes the ROI is hard to work out. There may be costs that are easily quantifiable i.e. has this software reduced time spent on administration and freed up company resources? Then there may be financial returns which are harder to see such as improved staff job satisfaction and increased staff retention as a result of using the software? A Customer Success Manager will be able to work with the customer to calculate the ROI to get a good sense of value return.

5. Additional use cases?

Discussing growing the value of the software is a good exercise once the software gets fully embedded into the company’s ‘DNA’. When you start using software, you rarely utilize all its features so it takes a little time to use the full suite of functionality at your disposal. In Quarterly Reviews a Customer Success Manager will share best practice knowledge from other customers on product use. This can be a good opportunity to run through some additional scenarios and to put a plan in place to test new use cases.

6. New features?

A Planned Quarterly Review is an opportunity to discuss the vendor’s current and future Product Road Map. There may be some current functionality which may have been missed or misunderstood, so the Customer Success Manager can spend time filling in the knowledge gaps. There may also be other desired functionality which may greatly improve the value to a customer, so Customer Success Managers can log these requests. A vendor will then typically review all customer feature requests collectively and then decide (1) If the feature is viable and can it be productized i.e. useful for all customers (2) What is the time frame for feature update? The outcomes from any feature request will be discussed with a customer keeping them in the loop.

If you would like to find out more about the Planned Quarterly Reviews provided by Klipboard please get in touch.