Member Success is not about making Members happy. Associations exist to make Members successful, not happy.
Monitoring Member Happiness
“What’s the best tool to monitoring individual Member happiness with my Concierge Onboarding and Member Success teams?”
Let’s talk about Happiness versus Success. If you try to go for the Happiness of your Members, you’re probably going to be in for a long, disappointing ride.
Sometimes that can cause you to go down the wrong path of solving things that are either outside of your control or outside the scope of what you need to be solving for your members.
That said, what we need to be focused on is the Success of our Members, which means we need to talk about Onboarding.
What does that even mean? It’s something which you may discuss regularly: When is a Member on board? What is that point?
Organizations will say, “Our Members are onboard after 30 days. Onboarding is 30 days,” and then on day 30, they move them out of onboarding. Whatever that means. They check a box. They’re not onboard. They just made it through 30 days. They didn’t achieve anything. They haven’t reached their first Progress Milestone. That’s a problem.
What we want to make sure of is that we know what onboarding means:
The Member has achieved some actual value for the first time. In your onboarding process call it something like ‘First Value Delivered (measured by Time to First Value – TTFV). Time to First Value (TTFV) is a commonly used Member Engagement metric to measure the efficiency of Onboarding.
Time to First Value (TTFV) is the amount of time between the inception of the membership and when the Member is Onboard.
Your Members are considered “on board” once they get actual value from, or (in more complex scenarios) they see the real value potential in – outside of the promises made by your membership marketing and sales team – their relationship with you.
TTFV is a Member Onboarding metric that is just a Goal (Objective + Conditions + Timeframe. Remember: most people equate Goal with Objective, and omit the time element, which is critical. Without a timeframe, a goal is just a wish).
Every Member makes progress on their own cadence, on their own schedule, on their own timeline. But you must set goals or Progress Milestones for them:
You would like your members to achieve their first Progress Milestone (define whatever that is that moves them toward their Desired Outcome, in their Appropriate Experience) and in some amount of time.
Then you must set and discuss the conditions of the Goal with them, so that they know what they are expected to accomplish on their own, and what you will assist (train, implement, etc.) them with in the process to get them to that Goal.
Again, they either get actual value from their relationship with you or, for the first time, see the real value potential in the product or in the relationship with you.
Maybe you want them to achieve that milestone in 30 days. That’s just a number you made up that you’d like to hit. As you learn more about your Members, improve your product and your processes, etc. you’ll readjust your TTFV goal.
No matter, some are going to achieve that goal in three days; Some might take 45 days. For those that take longer than your goal, you need to intervene and just make sure that everything’s good.
It might be fine, but it’s a goal, and you want to make sure that if things aren’t fine, you’re keeping them on track. You would want to intervene before the 30 days is up if you see that they’re not on track.
You can look at your overall TTFV to see how things are working at a macro level, but you can also look at how individual Members are progressing against the goal and take appropriate action.
TTFV should also figure into Member Engagement KPIs like Success Vector.
Just to be 100% clear… if your goal TTFV is 30-days and a Member hits 30-days… that doesn’t mean they got value and should be considered Onboard at that point. Their status should not change to Onboard until they reach what they determine is their value.
There are some products which might take months and months and months before members can actually get real value out of it because there’s not just setup time, but there’s actual time of using it before it becomes truly valuable. In that case, onboarding may be when a Member for the first time sees the value potential in your relationship.
Maybe that’s after going through some setup and onboarding and getting some dashboards and things like that up and running. There’s setup and implementation and getting those things set up for them, but they’re not actually usable. They’re not getting true value from it yet, but they will, and they see it for the first time outside of your promises and sales and marketing. They see the value potential. It’s either when they get the first value or when they see for the first time the value potential. That’s onboarding.
What must happen to get us there? Work back from that.
If they’re doing those things. If those things are happening … If we have a dedicated onboarding person or a dedicated onboarding team, that may look more like a project management situation. Are the members doing the things that are necessary to get value? If they aren’t, they’re not successful. The onboarding isn’t working.
Your Member Success Manager, or whoever owns the relationship with the Member, needs to be able to have visibility into those steps that the onboarding team is taking with the Member so that they can see whether things are working.
If things are not working … “working”, meaning: are we moving through these Progress Milestones in the onboarding process? If they’re not working, then the Member Success Manager could intervene with the onboarding.
Do you also look for satisfaction or happiness in the onboarding process? You can, but most of the time if you’re moving them through the steps that are going to be necessary, you won’t have to go look at other things to discover if they’re getting their Appropriate Experience, on .
We know that they’re on the right track to being successful. That’s the most important way to look at it.
Memberships Matter! 