Have you ever stopped to think about what your company would be without your customers? Let's agree… There's no point in having an incredible and complete solution if your end user can't extract value and see utility from it. That's why the Customer Success area has been increasingly present within companies, and a more data-driven Customer Success can achieve truly transformative results.
There is still a lot of confusion about this topic, especially regarding what this professional does and how they can be a key piece in your data strategy, even though today companies understand the need to combat churn, put the needs of customers at the center of the business, and establish the correct metrics so that the area is not, in the end, just a support with a different name.
Therefore, we will provide an overview of what the Customer Success area is, and how your company can have a more Data-Driven Customer Success.
What is Customer Success
Having a successful sales and marketing team is extremely important to conquer the market, expand opportunities, and create your company's success case. But just these areas are no longer enough to ensure business stability, guarantee a constant income, and still be able to grow continually. The truth is that the way companies sell has changed, just as the way people buy has changed.
Consumer relationships are no longer unilateral: someone sells, someone buys, and that’s it…
With businesses becoming increasingly digital and the rise in the number of companies focused on offering services, the responsibility of maintaining consumer loyalty is greater, especially given that there is a dynamic market conducive to the action of competitors. According to the Gartner glossary, customer success is a methodology to ensure that the customer achieves their goals through the products and solutions they acquire from your company and continues to buy or consume from your brand.
In other words: it involves all the effort your company invests in the success the customer has with your solutions. A common situation in CS teams is when, besides the customer learning, they are also responsible for technical support, but this is a mistake because it limits the area’s ability to generate and utilize vital data for the business.
For this reason, your CS area cannot be confused with other areas that also have interfaces with the customer, such as account management, support, and growth. Some data and insights that can be collected with the area focused solely on the customer experience are:
Your company's consumer journey;
User learning time with the solution;
Main difficulties and advantages of your tool or service;
Understanding the customer sales funnel post-acquisition;
The main reasons customers choose not to buy or to cancel contracts.
Moreover, a Customer Success area that is functioning well increases the chances of users choosing and recommending your company, improving revenue flow, both in acquiring new sources and repurchases.
5 strategies for a more Data-Driven Customer Success
Now that you understand what Customer Success is and the importance of having a focused area within your company, let's discuss the 5 main strategies for having your Data-Driven Customer Success.
1) Invest in data-driven people
An important point in building a data-driven area (and a company) is what we call data literacy, that is: the ability of your team to read, generate, and interpret usable data within your scope of action.
Finding the right people with well-developed analytical skills is a significant challenge in the Brazilian job market. When searching for professionals for your team, ideally look for those who are already data-oriented or, at the very least, data-aware (i.e., understand the importance of data use within the organization).
You don't need to find ultra-qualified professionals, but it is important, at the very least, to be able to count on those who have an interest in learning and who believe in a more data-focused approach. They will be the right allies in your data-driven journey!
2) Design clear processes
A Data-Driven Customer Success area relies on processes aimed at acquiring, interpreting, and generating insights through data. As professionals will always be in contact with your customer, they are the most suited to collect useful information that will underpin your decision-making.
One way to ensure this is by designing processes focused on data collection and interpretation, for generating useful insights. Encourage the documentation of interactions with customers, and all your learning stages to implement more efficient action points and to know the main moments of vulnerability in their journey with your solution.
3) Train
Data literacy throughout the organization is a constant process of training, reinforcement, and education to ensure that a data culture is always present in your team's daily life; therefore, never neglect the implementation of periodic training, especially for your Customer Success team.
Some useful training for the area, in addition to those focused on the market and your company's activities, include:
Data use applied to Customer Success;
Data collection and modeling;
How to improve the documentation of the customer journey.
4) Identify the biggest challenges in the area (and document them!)
Do you believe that your team has areas for improvement to work on, but what is being used to point this out within your area currently? This is an important reflection for all areas: knowing how to specify which data points to problems or guide decision-making.
Especially in an area with so much interface with your customers, this becomes vital; therefore, understand what the main bottlenecks of your team are and combat them efficiently.
5) Have clear metrics
Lastly, implement Customer Success metrics that are clear and make sense for your area’s reality and for the results you wish to achieve with it. Remember to keep a detailed history of each one, so that data analysis is possible. The essential metrics for Customer Success are:
Health Score
The Customer Health Score indicates the health level of your company’s customers, providing a classification: poor (likelihood of churn), medium (might renew), or good (renewal and upgrades). This metric aids in predicting customer behavior based on the analysis of certain variables, which may include: -
Usage time: What is the usage time of your product by your customers, and what is the likelihood of them turning to your solution?
Density: How many users within an account utilize your product?
Depth: What is the level of depth your users apply in using your product or solution? How many tools are in use, and what can be improved?
Support: How satisfied is your customer with the support and services received when they need to interface with someone from your team?
The ideal Customer Health Score will depend greatly on your company’s profile, the type of product, customer interface, and also the features of your solution.
Expansion
This metric makes sense for businesses with various revenue streams, involving expansion, additional, and complementary sales to an original product or service. It typically indicates that the customer is so satisfied with the solution or tool they have access to that they need to broaden the range of what they utilize.
Considering your customer's financial management, this metric serves to indicate that they are so satisfied with the impact they are receiving that it makes sense for them to invest even more in exchange for greater value with your solution. This metric is mainly affected by your team's performance, as the better the service and success of your customer, the more value and trust they will feel in the partnership with your company.
Activation
The concept of activation is quite simple: how long it takes for your customers to master the tools and solutions and start extracting value from them. Activation metrics will depend on mapping the usage stages of your tool or solution, and this will vary from business to business.
For example: if your company provides financial software, there is a minimum number of hours required before your customer knows how to use the tool expertly and sees its impact. Mapping learning paths based on functionalities that are or aren’t being utilized will help discover the main pain points of your user, and your CS team can act focused on these.
Some of these checkpoints can be: number of actions within your platform, website access, usage time, generated data, contact points with your team… To have appropriate activation criteria, build a learning journey that makes sense, based on the data your customer success team will generate!
NPS
The Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures overall customer satisfaction with your company and product. This theory determines whether your customers tend more to be promoters or detractors of your brand, based on intermittent surveys that categorize them into three distinct groups: detractor, neutral, or promoter.
If on a scale from 0 to 10, your customer rates their experience with your brand between 0 and 6 points, they will be classified as a detractor: someone who is dissatisfied and is unlikely to positively advocate for your brand - they may even speak negatively and not recommend it to other potential customers.
If on that same scale they rate it between 7 to 8, they are considered neutral: this means they are marginally satisfied, but still not likely to recommend your brand. If their score is between 9 to 10, your customer can already be considered a promoter of your company: they are so satisfied that they will likely recommend it to other potential customers. One way to understand your NPS is by calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, which can range from -100% to +100%.
Churn (cancellations)
Generally, this metric indicates the moment of a customer's decision to cancel their services with a company and reflects the overall satisfaction with the experience you provide, not just the assistance they received from CS or support. This metric is exponential, and in the long run, it significantly impacts the company's results. To calculate this metric, there are two approaches: churn by number of accounts, which calculates the cancellation percentage by the number of customers, or by revenue, which calculates the total amount of recurrent revenue lost due to customer exits.
Although it is a CS metric, churn generally reflects the performance of the entire company because many factors lead a customer to decide to cancel. Tip: when you start using your data, you will begin to better understand how to reduce churn as well.
Conclusion
A more data-driven customer success involves having a team capable of generating, interpreting, and guiding themselves based on the data collected alongside customers. Therefore, having a more data-driven area means having people skilled in data analysis, as well as processes and metrics that reinforce this culture.
Areas that have contact and interface with your customers are fundamental to helping acquire useful data about them and guiding the more assertive decision-making for your company’s strategy and planning.
Remember: being data-driven is not just about having data about your company, but about knowing how to generate insights with it and using them to revolutionize your business, and in this mission companies like Erathos can assist you, offering everything from the necessary support to implement your company’s data infrastructure, to creating BI and Analytics dashboards, and eventually using technologies based on artificial intelligence to predict scenarios and offer insights on what decisions to make.
Want to know more about how Erathos can help your company become data-driven in less time? Click on the WhatsApp icon next to it and request contact right now!
Have you ever stopped to think about what your company would be without your customers? Let's agree… There's no point in having an incredible and complete solution if your end user can't extract value and see utility from it. That's why the Customer Success area has been increasingly present within companies, and a more data-driven Customer Success can achieve truly transformative results.
There is still a lot of confusion about this topic, especially regarding what this professional does and how they can be a key piece in your data strategy, even though today companies understand the need to combat churn, put the needs of customers at the center of the business, and establish the correct metrics so that the area is not, in the end, just a support with a different name.
Therefore, we will provide an overview of what the Customer Success area is, and how your company can have a more Data-Driven Customer Success.
What is Customer Success
Having a successful sales and marketing team is extremely important to conquer the market, expand opportunities, and create your company's success case. But just these areas are no longer enough to ensure business stability, guarantee a constant income, and still be able to grow continually. The truth is that the way companies sell has changed, just as the way people buy has changed.
Consumer relationships are no longer unilateral: someone sells, someone buys, and that’s it…
With businesses becoming increasingly digital and the rise in the number of companies focused on offering services, the responsibility of maintaining consumer loyalty is greater, especially given that there is a dynamic market conducive to the action of competitors. According to the Gartner glossary, customer success is a methodology to ensure that the customer achieves their goals through the products and solutions they acquire from your company and continues to buy or consume from your brand.
In other words: it involves all the effort your company invests in the success the customer has with your solutions. A common situation in CS teams is when, besides the customer learning, they are also responsible for technical support, but this is a mistake because it limits the area’s ability to generate and utilize vital data for the business.
For this reason, your CS area cannot be confused with other areas that also have interfaces with the customer, such as account management, support, and growth. Some data and insights that can be collected with the area focused solely on the customer experience are:
Your company's consumer journey;
User learning time with the solution;
Main difficulties and advantages of your tool or service;
Understanding the customer sales funnel post-acquisition;
The main reasons customers choose not to buy or to cancel contracts.
Moreover, a Customer Success area that is functioning well increases the chances of users choosing and recommending your company, improving revenue flow, both in acquiring new sources and repurchases.
5 strategies for a more Data-Driven Customer Success
Now that you understand what Customer Success is and the importance of having a focused area within your company, let's discuss the 5 main strategies for having your Data-Driven Customer Success.
1) Invest in data-driven people
An important point in building a data-driven area (and a company) is what we call data literacy, that is: the ability of your team to read, generate, and interpret usable data within your scope of action.
Finding the right people with well-developed analytical skills is a significant challenge in the Brazilian job market. When searching for professionals for your team, ideally look for those who are already data-oriented or, at the very least, data-aware (i.e., understand the importance of data use within the organization).
You don't need to find ultra-qualified professionals, but it is important, at the very least, to be able to count on those who have an interest in learning and who believe in a more data-focused approach. They will be the right allies in your data-driven journey!
2) Design clear processes
A Data-Driven Customer Success area relies on processes aimed at acquiring, interpreting, and generating insights through data. As professionals will always be in contact with your customer, they are the most suited to collect useful information that will underpin your decision-making.
One way to ensure this is by designing processes focused on data collection and interpretation, for generating useful insights. Encourage the documentation of interactions with customers, and all your learning stages to implement more efficient action points and to know the main moments of vulnerability in their journey with your solution.
3) Train
Data literacy throughout the organization is a constant process of training, reinforcement, and education to ensure that a data culture is always present in your team's daily life; therefore, never neglect the implementation of periodic training, especially for your Customer Success team.
Some useful training for the area, in addition to those focused on the market and your company's activities, include:
Data use applied to Customer Success;
Data collection and modeling;
How to improve the documentation of the customer journey.
4) Identify the biggest challenges in the area (and document them!)
Do you believe that your team has areas for improvement to work on, but what is being used to point this out within your area currently? This is an important reflection for all areas: knowing how to specify which data points to problems or guide decision-making.
Especially in an area with so much interface with your customers, this becomes vital; therefore, understand what the main bottlenecks of your team are and combat them efficiently.
5) Have clear metrics
Lastly, implement Customer Success metrics that are clear and make sense for your area’s reality and for the results you wish to achieve with it. Remember to keep a detailed history of each one, so that data analysis is possible. The essential metrics for Customer Success are:
Health Score
The Customer Health Score indicates the health level of your company’s customers, providing a classification: poor (likelihood of churn), medium (might renew), or good (renewal and upgrades). This metric aids in predicting customer behavior based on the analysis of certain variables, which may include: -
Usage time: What is the usage time of your product by your customers, and what is the likelihood of them turning to your solution?
Density: How many users within an account utilize your product?
Depth: What is the level of depth your users apply in using your product or solution? How many tools are in use, and what can be improved?
Support: How satisfied is your customer with the support and services received when they need to interface with someone from your team?
The ideal Customer Health Score will depend greatly on your company’s profile, the type of product, customer interface, and also the features of your solution.
Expansion
This metric makes sense for businesses with various revenue streams, involving expansion, additional, and complementary sales to an original product or service. It typically indicates that the customer is so satisfied with the solution or tool they have access to that they need to broaden the range of what they utilize.
Considering your customer's financial management, this metric serves to indicate that they are so satisfied with the impact they are receiving that it makes sense for them to invest even more in exchange for greater value with your solution. This metric is mainly affected by your team's performance, as the better the service and success of your customer, the more value and trust they will feel in the partnership with your company.
Activation
The concept of activation is quite simple: how long it takes for your customers to master the tools and solutions and start extracting value from them. Activation metrics will depend on mapping the usage stages of your tool or solution, and this will vary from business to business.
For example: if your company provides financial software, there is a minimum number of hours required before your customer knows how to use the tool expertly and sees its impact. Mapping learning paths based on functionalities that are or aren’t being utilized will help discover the main pain points of your user, and your CS team can act focused on these.
Some of these checkpoints can be: number of actions within your platform, website access, usage time, generated data, contact points with your team… To have appropriate activation criteria, build a learning journey that makes sense, based on the data your customer success team will generate!
NPS
The Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures overall customer satisfaction with your company and product. This theory determines whether your customers tend more to be promoters or detractors of your brand, based on intermittent surveys that categorize them into three distinct groups: detractor, neutral, or promoter.
If on a scale from 0 to 10, your customer rates their experience with your brand between 0 and 6 points, they will be classified as a detractor: someone who is dissatisfied and is unlikely to positively advocate for your brand - they may even speak negatively and not recommend it to other potential customers.
If on that same scale they rate it between 7 to 8, they are considered neutral: this means they are marginally satisfied, but still not likely to recommend your brand. If their score is between 9 to 10, your customer can already be considered a promoter of your company: they are so satisfied that they will likely recommend it to other potential customers. One way to understand your NPS is by calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, which can range from -100% to +100%.
Churn (cancellations)
Generally, this metric indicates the moment of a customer's decision to cancel their services with a company and reflects the overall satisfaction with the experience you provide, not just the assistance they received from CS or support. This metric is exponential, and in the long run, it significantly impacts the company's results. To calculate this metric, there are two approaches: churn by number of accounts, which calculates the cancellation percentage by the number of customers, or by revenue, which calculates the total amount of recurrent revenue lost due to customer exits.
Although it is a CS metric, churn generally reflects the performance of the entire company because many factors lead a customer to decide to cancel. Tip: when you start using your data, you will begin to better understand how to reduce churn as well.
Conclusion
A more data-driven customer success involves having a team capable of generating, interpreting, and guiding themselves based on the data collected alongside customers. Therefore, having a more data-driven area means having people skilled in data analysis, as well as processes and metrics that reinforce this culture.
Areas that have contact and interface with your customers are fundamental to helping acquire useful data about them and guiding the more assertive decision-making for your company’s strategy and planning.
Remember: being data-driven is not just about having data about your company, but about knowing how to generate insights with it and using them to revolutionize your business, and in this mission companies like Erathos can assist you, offering everything from the necessary support to implement your company’s data infrastructure, to creating BI and Analytics dashboards, and eventually using technologies based on artificial intelligence to predict scenarios and offer insights on what decisions to make.
Want to know more about how Erathos can help your company become data-driven in less time? Click on the WhatsApp icon next to it and request contact right now!
Have you ever stopped to think about what your company would be without your customers? Let's agree… There's no point in having an incredible and complete solution if your end user can't extract value and see utility from it. That's why the Customer Success area has been increasingly present within companies, and a more data-driven Customer Success can achieve truly transformative results.
There is still a lot of confusion about this topic, especially regarding what this professional does and how they can be a key piece in your data strategy, even though today companies understand the need to combat churn, put the needs of customers at the center of the business, and establish the correct metrics so that the area is not, in the end, just a support with a different name.
Therefore, we will provide an overview of what the Customer Success area is, and how your company can have a more Data-Driven Customer Success.
What is Customer Success
Having a successful sales and marketing team is extremely important to conquer the market, expand opportunities, and create your company's success case. But just these areas are no longer enough to ensure business stability, guarantee a constant income, and still be able to grow continually. The truth is that the way companies sell has changed, just as the way people buy has changed.
Consumer relationships are no longer unilateral: someone sells, someone buys, and that’s it…
With businesses becoming increasingly digital and the rise in the number of companies focused on offering services, the responsibility of maintaining consumer loyalty is greater, especially given that there is a dynamic market conducive to the action of competitors. According to the Gartner glossary, customer success is a methodology to ensure that the customer achieves their goals through the products and solutions they acquire from your company and continues to buy or consume from your brand.
In other words: it involves all the effort your company invests in the success the customer has with your solutions. A common situation in CS teams is when, besides the customer learning, they are also responsible for technical support, but this is a mistake because it limits the area’s ability to generate and utilize vital data for the business.
For this reason, your CS area cannot be confused with other areas that also have interfaces with the customer, such as account management, support, and growth. Some data and insights that can be collected with the area focused solely on the customer experience are:
Your company's consumer journey;
User learning time with the solution;
Main difficulties and advantages of your tool or service;
Understanding the customer sales funnel post-acquisition;
The main reasons customers choose not to buy or to cancel contracts.
Moreover, a Customer Success area that is functioning well increases the chances of users choosing and recommending your company, improving revenue flow, both in acquiring new sources and repurchases.
5 strategies for a more Data-Driven Customer Success
Now that you understand what Customer Success is and the importance of having a focused area within your company, let's discuss the 5 main strategies for having your Data-Driven Customer Success.
1) Invest in data-driven people
An important point in building a data-driven area (and a company) is what we call data literacy, that is: the ability of your team to read, generate, and interpret usable data within your scope of action.
Finding the right people with well-developed analytical skills is a significant challenge in the Brazilian job market. When searching for professionals for your team, ideally look for those who are already data-oriented or, at the very least, data-aware (i.e., understand the importance of data use within the organization).
You don't need to find ultra-qualified professionals, but it is important, at the very least, to be able to count on those who have an interest in learning and who believe in a more data-focused approach. They will be the right allies in your data-driven journey!
2) Design clear processes
A Data-Driven Customer Success area relies on processes aimed at acquiring, interpreting, and generating insights through data. As professionals will always be in contact with your customer, they are the most suited to collect useful information that will underpin your decision-making.
One way to ensure this is by designing processes focused on data collection and interpretation, for generating useful insights. Encourage the documentation of interactions with customers, and all your learning stages to implement more efficient action points and to know the main moments of vulnerability in their journey with your solution.
3) Train
Data literacy throughout the organization is a constant process of training, reinforcement, and education to ensure that a data culture is always present in your team's daily life; therefore, never neglect the implementation of periodic training, especially for your Customer Success team.
Some useful training for the area, in addition to those focused on the market and your company's activities, include:
Data use applied to Customer Success;
Data collection and modeling;
How to improve the documentation of the customer journey.
4) Identify the biggest challenges in the area (and document them!)
Do you believe that your team has areas for improvement to work on, but what is being used to point this out within your area currently? This is an important reflection for all areas: knowing how to specify which data points to problems or guide decision-making.
Especially in an area with so much interface with your customers, this becomes vital; therefore, understand what the main bottlenecks of your team are and combat them efficiently.
5) Have clear metrics
Lastly, implement Customer Success metrics that are clear and make sense for your area’s reality and for the results you wish to achieve with it. Remember to keep a detailed history of each one, so that data analysis is possible. The essential metrics for Customer Success are:
Health Score
The Customer Health Score indicates the health level of your company’s customers, providing a classification: poor (likelihood of churn), medium (might renew), or good (renewal and upgrades). This metric aids in predicting customer behavior based on the analysis of certain variables, which may include: -
Usage time: What is the usage time of your product by your customers, and what is the likelihood of them turning to your solution?
Density: How many users within an account utilize your product?
Depth: What is the level of depth your users apply in using your product or solution? How many tools are in use, and what can be improved?
Support: How satisfied is your customer with the support and services received when they need to interface with someone from your team?
The ideal Customer Health Score will depend greatly on your company’s profile, the type of product, customer interface, and also the features of your solution.
Expansion
This metric makes sense for businesses with various revenue streams, involving expansion, additional, and complementary sales to an original product or service. It typically indicates that the customer is so satisfied with the solution or tool they have access to that they need to broaden the range of what they utilize.
Considering your customer's financial management, this metric serves to indicate that they are so satisfied with the impact they are receiving that it makes sense for them to invest even more in exchange for greater value with your solution. This metric is mainly affected by your team's performance, as the better the service and success of your customer, the more value and trust they will feel in the partnership with your company.
Activation
The concept of activation is quite simple: how long it takes for your customers to master the tools and solutions and start extracting value from them. Activation metrics will depend on mapping the usage stages of your tool or solution, and this will vary from business to business.
For example: if your company provides financial software, there is a minimum number of hours required before your customer knows how to use the tool expertly and sees its impact. Mapping learning paths based on functionalities that are or aren’t being utilized will help discover the main pain points of your user, and your CS team can act focused on these.
Some of these checkpoints can be: number of actions within your platform, website access, usage time, generated data, contact points with your team… To have appropriate activation criteria, build a learning journey that makes sense, based on the data your customer success team will generate!
NPS
The Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures overall customer satisfaction with your company and product. This theory determines whether your customers tend more to be promoters or detractors of your brand, based on intermittent surveys that categorize them into three distinct groups: detractor, neutral, or promoter.
If on a scale from 0 to 10, your customer rates their experience with your brand between 0 and 6 points, they will be classified as a detractor: someone who is dissatisfied and is unlikely to positively advocate for your brand - they may even speak negatively and not recommend it to other potential customers.
If on that same scale they rate it between 7 to 8, they are considered neutral: this means they are marginally satisfied, but still not likely to recommend your brand. If their score is between 9 to 10, your customer can already be considered a promoter of your company: they are so satisfied that they will likely recommend it to other potential customers. One way to understand your NPS is by calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, which can range from -100% to +100%.
Churn (cancellations)
Generally, this metric indicates the moment of a customer's decision to cancel their services with a company and reflects the overall satisfaction with the experience you provide, not just the assistance they received from CS or support. This metric is exponential, and in the long run, it significantly impacts the company's results. To calculate this metric, there are two approaches: churn by number of accounts, which calculates the cancellation percentage by the number of customers, or by revenue, which calculates the total amount of recurrent revenue lost due to customer exits.
Although it is a CS metric, churn generally reflects the performance of the entire company because many factors lead a customer to decide to cancel. Tip: when you start using your data, you will begin to better understand how to reduce churn as well.
Conclusion
A more data-driven customer success involves having a team capable of generating, interpreting, and guiding themselves based on the data collected alongside customers. Therefore, having a more data-driven area means having people skilled in data analysis, as well as processes and metrics that reinforce this culture.
Areas that have contact and interface with your customers are fundamental to helping acquire useful data about them and guiding the more assertive decision-making for your company’s strategy and planning.
Remember: being data-driven is not just about having data about your company, but about knowing how to generate insights with it and using them to revolutionize your business, and in this mission companies like Erathos can assist you, offering everything from the necessary support to implement your company’s data infrastructure, to creating BI and Analytics dashboards, and eventually using technologies based on artificial intelligence to predict scenarios and offer insights on what decisions to make.
Want to know more about how Erathos can help your company become data-driven in less time? Click on the WhatsApp icon next to it and request contact right now!
Have you ever stopped to think about what your company would be without your customers? Let's agree… There's no point in having an incredible and complete solution if your end user can't extract value and see utility from it. That's why the Customer Success area has been increasingly present within companies, and a more data-driven Customer Success can achieve truly transformative results.
There is still a lot of confusion about this topic, especially regarding what this professional does and how they can be a key piece in your data strategy, even though today companies understand the need to combat churn, put the needs of customers at the center of the business, and establish the correct metrics so that the area is not, in the end, just a support with a different name.
Therefore, we will provide an overview of what the Customer Success area is, and how your company can have a more Data-Driven Customer Success.
What is Customer Success
Having a successful sales and marketing team is extremely important to conquer the market, expand opportunities, and create your company's success case. But just these areas are no longer enough to ensure business stability, guarantee a constant income, and still be able to grow continually. The truth is that the way companies sell has changed, just as the way people buy has changed.
Consumer relationships are no longer unilateral: someone sells, someone buys, and that’s it…
With businesses becoming increasingly digital and the rise in the number of companies focused on offering services, the responsibility of maintaining consumer loyalty is greater, especially given that there is a dynamic market conducive to the action of competitors. According to the Gartner glossary, customer success is a methodology to ensure that the customer achieves their goals through the products and solutions they acquire from your company and continues to buy or consume from your brand.
In other words: it involves all the effort your company invests in the success the customer has with your solutions. A common situation in CS teams is when, besides the customer learning, they are also responsible for technical support, but this is a mistake because it limits the area’s ability to generate and utilize vital data for the business.
For this reason, your CS area cannot be confused with other areas that also have interfaces with the customer, such as account management, support, and growth. Some data and insights that can be collected with the area focused solely on the customer experience are:
Your company's consumer journey;
User learning time with the solution;
Main difficulties and advantages of your tool or service;
Understanding the customer sales funnel post-acquisition;
The main reasons customers choose not to buy or to cancel contracts.
Moreover, a Customer Success area that is functioning well increases the chances of users choosing and recommending your company, improving revenue flow, both in acquiring new sources and repurchases.
5 strategies for a more Data-Driven Customer Success
Now that you understand what Customer Success is and the importance of having a focused area within your company, let's discuss the 5 main strategies for having your Data-Driven Customer Success.
1) Invest in data-driven people
An important point in building a data-driven area (and a company) is what we call data literacy, that is: the ability of your team to read, generate, and interpret usable data within your scope of action.
Finding the right people with well-developed analytical skills is a significant challenge in the Brazilian job market. When searching for professionals for your team, ideally look for those who are already data-oriented or, at the very least, data-aware (i.e., understand the importance of data use within the organization).
You don't need to find ultra-qualified professionals, but it is important, at the very least, to be able to count on those who have an interest in learning and who believe in a more data-focused approach. They will be the right allies in your data-driven journey!
2) Design clear processes
A Data-Driven Customer Success area relies on processes aimed at acquiring, interpreting, and generating insights through data. As professionals will always be in contact with your customer, they are the most suited to collect useful information that will underpin your decision-making.
One way to ensure this is by designing processes focused on data collection and interpretation, for generating useful insights. Encourage the documentation of interactions with customers, and all your learning stages to implement more efficient action points and to know the main moments of vulnerability in their journey with your solution.
3) Train
Data literacy throughout the organization is a constant process of training, reinforcement, and education to ensure that a data culture is always present in your team's daily life; therefore, never neglect the implementation of periodic training, especially for your Customer Success team.
Some useful training for the area, in addition to those focused on the market and your company's activities, include:
Data use applied to Customer Success;
Data collection and modeling;
How to improve the documentation of the customer journey.
4) Identify the biggest challenges in the area (and document them!)
Do you believe that your team has areas for improvement to work on, but what is being used to point this out within your area currently? This is an important reflection for all areas: knowing how to specify which data points to problems or guide decision-making.
Especially in an area with so much interface with your customers, this becomes vital; therefore, understand what the main bottlenecks of your team are and combat them efficiently.
5) Have clear metrics
Lastly, implement Customer Success metrics that are clear and make sense for your area’s reality and for the results you wish to achieve with it. Remember to keep a detailed history of each one, so that data analysis is possible. The essential metrics for Customer Success are:
Health Score
The Customer Health Score indicates the health level of your company’s customers, providing a classification: poor (likelihood of churn), medium (might renew), or good (renewal and upgrades). This metric aids in predicting customer behavior based on the analysis of certain variables, which may include: -
Usage time: What is the usage time of your product by your customers, and what is the likelihood of them turning to your solution?
Density: How many users within an account utilize your product?
Depth: What is the level of depth your users apply in using your product or solution? How many tools are in use, and what can be improved?
Support: How satisfied is your customer with the support and services received when they need to interface with someone from your team?
The ideal Customer Health Score will depend greatly on your company’s profile, the type of product, customer interface, and also the features of your solution.
Expansion
This metric makes sense for businesses with various revenue streams, involving expansion, additional, and complementary sales to an original product or service. It typically indicates that the customer is so satisfied with the solution or tool they have access to that they need to broaden the range of what they utilize.
Considering your customer's financial management, this metric serves to indicate that they are so satisfied with the impact they are receiving that it makes sense for them to invest even more in exchange for greater value with your solution. This metric is mainly affected by your team's performance, as the better the service and success of your customer, the more value and trust they will feel in the partnership with your company.
Activation
The concept of activation is quite simple: how long it takes for your customers to master the tools and solutions and start extracting value from them. Activation metrics will depend on mapping the usage stages of your tool or solution, and this will vary from business to business.
For example: if your company provides financial software, there is a minimum number of hours required before your customer knows how to use the tool expertly and sees its impact. Mapping learning paths based on functionalities that are or aren’t being utilized will help discover the main pain points of your user, and your CS team can act focused on these.
Some of these checkpoints can be: number of actions within your platform, website access, usage time, generated data, contact points with your team… To have appropriate activation criteria, build a learning journey that makes sense, based on the data your customer success team will generate!
NPS
The Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures overall customer satisfaction with your company and product. This theory determines whether your customers tend more to be promoters or detractors of your brand, based on intermittent surveys that categorize them into three distinct groups: detractor, neutral, or promoter.
If on a scale from 0 to 10, your customer rates their experience with your brand between 0 and 6 points, they will be classified as a detractor: someone who is dissatisfied and is unlikely to positively advocate for your brand - they may even speak negatively and not recommend it to other potential customers.
If on that same scale they rate it between 7 to 8, they are considered neutral: this means they are marginally satisfied, but still not likely to recommend your brand. If their score is between 9 to 10, your customer can already be considered a promoter of your company: they are so satisfied that they will likely recommend it to other potential customers. One way to understand your NPS is by calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, which can range from -100% to +100%.
Churn (cancellations)
Generally, this metric indicates the moment of a customer's decision to cancel their services with a company and reflects the overall satisfaction with the experience you provide, not just the assistance they received from CS or support. This metric is exponential, and in the long run, it significantly impacts the company's results. To calculate this metric, there are two approaches: churn by number of accounts, which calculates the cancellation percentage by the number of customers, or by revenue, which calculates the total amount of recurrent revenue lost due to customer exits.
Although it is a CS metric, churn generally reflects the performance of the entire company because many factors lead a customer to decide to cancel. Tip: when you start using your data, you will begin to better understand how to reduce churn as well.
Conclusion
A more data-driven customer success involves having a team capable of generating, interpreting, and guiding themselves based on the data collected alongside customers. Therefore, having a more data-driven area means having people skilled in data analysis, as well as processes and metrics that reinforce this culture.
Areas that have contact and interface with your customers are fundamental to helping acquire useful data about them and guiding the more assertive decision-making for your company’s strategy and planning.
Remember: being data-driven is not just about having data about your company, but about knowing how to generate insights with it and using them to revolutionize your business, and in this mission companies like Erathos can assist you, offering everything from the necessary support to implement your company’s data infrastructure, to creating BI and Analytics dashboards, and eventually using technologies based on artificial intelligence to predict scenarios and offer insights on what decisions to make.
Want to know more about how Erathos can help your company become data-driven in less time? Click on the WhatsApp icon next to it and request contact right now!