I recently wrote an article for Kyle Poyar’s awesome publication Growth Unhinged where I talked about how we use Claude at Fin in the customer experience organization. I mentioned that one of the most game changing use cases for me was using Claude to help me inspect my business. I use Claude in a few key ways to inspect the accounts my team is responsible for:
Run a weekly Operational review
Automate a weekly digest that surfaces risks and opportunities
Set up alerts
Create next steps and follow ups that drive the rest of the week
In this post I’ll focus on # 1: the Operational Review.
The Operational Review
Fin President Archana Agrawal has a riff on a quote from James Clear’s Atomic Habits. His quote is “you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Archana’s quote, a sort of mantra in our CX org, is
“You don’t rise to the level of your targets, your fall to the level of your inspection.” - Archana Agrawal, President, Fin
The goal of an ops review is to inspect your business from all angles and take action where there are hot spots or opportunities.
At a minimum, your ops review inspects some facet of your biggest business risks, forecasting and pacing against targets, and areas of great upside. My Ops reviews have covered all or some subset of the following over the years:
Riskiest renewals 6-12 months out to focus on retention targets
Forecasts, pacing and attainment across adoption (SaaS) or outcomes (AI) targets
If forecasting, break down by best case, most likely and commits
Upside inspection - understanding points of leverage
Account Hygiene - handovers, onboarding, multithreading, QBRs, etc
Simply put, your ops review should surface your offensive plays, defensive strategy and other key elements of your success model. Ideally, this review takes place frequently, and, as I’ve learned from my manager, Junan, be a group activity that aligns your org. I can’t imagine a world in which you aren’t reviewing your business on at least a biweekly cadence. My team meets weekly to go through the ops review, inspect the business, align on strategy and plays and monitor progress of any hot spots we uncover.
We cycle through three core themes every month:
1. Defense — Risk Reviews and Lowhort Identification. This is where we review customers who have gaps, or who are “low” on the specific metrics we treat as a proxy for health. The goal is to defend the base — to surface at-risk accounts early enough that we can actually deploy a targeted play, instead of finding out at renewal. After inspecting your top accounts 1:1 you’ll need a scaled approach. That’s where you start to define cohorts that behave similarly and target them with specific strategies.
2. Offense — Adoption and Outcomes Drivers. These sessions are about unlocking growth from customers who are already healthy and engaged, and who have high potential for further expansion or utilization.
3.Hygiene & program reviews — in high touch success, this could start at the beginning of the quarter with a book cutting analysis, end the quarter with a churn and contraction review and in between, look across multithreading, executive sponsorship, champions, maturity, feature request/bugs, QBRs delivered, handoffs, new business onboarding health etc. In scale/digital, review key journeys, metrics, signals, and the work our agents and automations are driving. If you run a voice of customer program, this is where you’re reviewing trends, closing the loop, evaluating your partnership with product to get to a certain number/% of requests committed to the roadmap.
4.High Touchish/Cherry Picks. This is our scale-specific version of deploying the “high touch” CS motion. We inspect our top accounts for proactive engagements to launch.
Defense, offense, hygiene and a mix of 1 by 1 and cohort reviews cycle through our reviews weekly, with different leaders driving the discussion.
How I built the ops review in Claude
My very first build was my own team dashboard. I break down this build in this post on Growth Unhinged in detail. After you have a sense of what data exists in your org, use Claude to build an intro to the methodology and then a section to run each week’s focus.
Lowhort/Defense
My first attempt at an operational review dashboard (which is intact today but has certainly evolved) focused on identifying specific scenarios that would result in underperformance or risk to the business. To identify scenarios, I started with a team brainstorm. We put all brainstormed scenarios into a backlog and had Claude inspect our assigned books and run a /brainstorm skill, downselecting to 3 scenarios that would have the biggest impact on churn or contraction, or underutilization. The rest went into the backlog for occasional spot checks or reconsideration down the line, with the understanding that front line managers review these frequently via a Claude scan and alerts to start each week. The 3 scenarios helped us determine our list of “Lowhorts”, or accounts that met the criteria for these 3 scenarios that we needed to manage. For each scenario’s lowhort list, we identified plays to turn things around, executed over the next month then came back to assess progress and impact the following month. An example is identifying customers who had exposed a high number of conversations to Fin, but for some reason weren’t generating resolutions.
Resolution Drivers/Offense
We are fine tuning this motion but Claude is at the heart of it also. I started this themed review by asking Claude to help me find the most efficient ways to drive outcomes and hit my quarterly targets. Claude scanned account channels in Slack, Snowflake and Gong to give each of my regional success leader cohorts of accounts with the greatest potential upside across our product line. Managers and CSMs can apply an editorial eye to these suggestions but they’ll get better over time as you work through refining the recipes in Claude that scan this for you. If you’re inspecting a long tail segment, you’ll get cohorts (hihorts, lol!) here as well. With a list of accounts generated here, your CSMs can prioritize and drive your biggest bets forward.
Cherry Picks/ High-touch-ish
Think of cherry picks as resolution drivers but for your scale motion where you want to approach your operations with the best of both worlds - account inspection and cohort inspection. In cherry picks, you can put on the high-touch hat and ask Claude to give your regional leaders a prioritized list of accounts with the greatest potential upside for their teams to action. But you’ll need to make this list short and supplement it with the cohort approach. Maybe you pick your
I have each of the above themes built into its own tab in the ops review dashboard and we use each tab with its corresponding views on its corresponding week. Soon I’ll hand this app over to our ops lead who just got here and I’m sure she’ll build something 10X better than what we have now (spoiler alert as this is a delayed post…she did! Thanks Caili!) Building involves picking the metrics/scenarios as well as understanding what altitude you’ll discuss live in the ops review and building around that. I did NOT do this at first. I wanted the ops review to inspect everything. At all altitudes. I felt like we’d build forever and execute never so my biggest advice is to really nail down the methodology but DO IT WITH REAL DATA. Everything sounds nice to inspect in theory but in practice everything takes longer.
Beyond the ops review itself
A few things worth thinking through once you have the mechanism running:
How does this flow upward to your own leader? Figure out the right altitude across your org from the bottoms up. What are your front line managers reviewing with their CSMs? What are second line managers/directors reviewing? What do you inspect and what do you roll up for your own leaders. Your leader almost certainly doesn’t want the same granularity you’re inspecting at but align with them on what’s critical.
How does it flow to your sales partners? Your largest accounts need one-by-one discussion. Your long tail is never going to get that — it needs a cohort-based approach, or you’ll drown. How are your front line managers and front line sales managers aligning?
What’s the lightest way to launch this? Don’t wait for the perfect version. If you don’t have a cadence yet, start one soon and don’t overcomplicate it. Begin by inspecting one thing regularly, then add another and another, pare back, add another until you are confident that you have the right level and altitude of oversight across your book. If you’re building an ops dashboard in Claude, ship the version of it that you can actually run weekly. You can make it more robust later. You cannot make up for months of not inspecting anything though so time is of the essence and launching v1 fast should be your goal.
Next post: weekly automations to run in Claude to inspect your business while you’re sleeping