Hi @willpatterson! Thanks for calling in :)

These status change reasons can be a powerful game changer. The goal should be to answer the questions:

• How many of our new customers are off track in their onboarding process?
• Why are they off track?
• What can we do about that?

It’s helpful to choose “Groups” and “Reasons” that will allow you to quickly drill into the answers above. It might help to first answer the question of “What do you want to know when it comes to why certain customers are off track? What direction would help you best improve the situation for the customer?” 

Shrinking the distance between insight and action is the key to good data gathering.

Some companies will want to know which department could deliver the most impact, so they will start at the “Group” level with the main bullets below and then “Reasons” along the lines of the sub bullets:

• Product
  • Feature X
  • Bug Y
  • Performance challenge
• Sales
  • Misaligned expectations
  • Unresponsive since contract signature
  • Cost / contract concern
• Onboarding
  • Went dark
  • New team involved
  • Internal bandwidth limitation
  • Customer bandwidth limitation
• Partners
  • Unavailability
  • Team dynamic
  • Misaligned expectations

Other companies want to answer the “Why are they off track?” question by first looking at common concerns and then drilling into reasons that justify that concern. Your list is a great example of that:

• Cancellation
  • Lack of funding
  • No internal support
• Client not ready
  • Waiting for XYZ
• Construction Delay
  • unresolvable
  • resolvable
• Data Migration Issue
  • Internal issue
  • Customer issue
• Earlier Date Requested
  • Cannot accommodate
  • Working to accommodate
• Internal Mistake
  • X
  • Y
  • Z
• Unresponsive
  • Abandon
  • Continued outreach
  • Involving other teams

Either approach can work, as long as the team gets together to agree upon the next steps that should be taken to address each status change reason. With that understanding in place, these reports will help you dramatically reduce the time between insight and action and quickly move your customers from escalated to on-track.

Guide on!

​​​​We’re really focused on whether a delay is caused by internal or external factors, and is it something controllable/recoverable or something we simply have to “deal with”. Here are our groups with general idea of values under them. 

Client Availability (Are they too busy? Are they just ghosting?

Escalated Issues (Official pause requst / contract dispute)

Internal Delay (backlog, etc)

Moving Forward… Slowly (making progress but low energy, milestone where stall happened)

Product Issue (Waiting for specific feature, performance concerns, etc)

product issues and escalated issues mean that I am getting involved, as well as our additional leadership team members to address concerns directly. Other groups are things that the PM can and should handle in our process.