How to Measure Implementation and Support CSat

Implementation can be time-intensive and costly to your company. Often SaaS companies with products that require a more customized or intensive implementation process will charge their customers an upfront implementation fee in addition to the monthly recurring subscription fee. Since an implementation fee will be calculated based on estimates of the time and labor required to onboard a customer prior to actual implementation, it is important to track your inputs so that you can accurately estimate and then charge your company's cost to implement, plus margin.

The Impact: A data-based estimate of the amount of time an implementation process will require allows you to bill appropriately for implementation. Additionally, tracking the number of hours spent implementing a customer allows you to take advantage of invoicing additional hours over the initial estimate if allowed by your customer contract. In either case, having data on how much an implementation costs and ensuring that data is robust and convincing will help during an exit.

The Goal: Establish a process to track the number of man hours required to fully implement a new customer.

How can Golden Section Assist?

Steps

1. Use the PDCA methodology described in Play: Quality Management Systems and the template provided to create a process for tracking implementation man hours by customer. Considerations:
   • What is considered an implementation activity?
   • Where/how should it be tracked?
   • Do we want to set targets for implementation hours per customer?
   • What milestones or dependencies should be tracked by time to better understand the resource cost over the project lifecycle?
   • How do we respond if a customer's implementation process surpasses the amount of man hours we estimated? Some SaaS contracts allow for additional hours to be billed to the customer. If we have a similar term, what is the process to invoice additional man hours?