Data is a crucial aspect of customer success management as it provides analytics that allow you to retain customers, upsell to them, and more. You can integrate this data into your customer account journey to track sales activities and optimize the process. Being data driven is necessary for forming important business decisions and building a data-driven culture. There is an increasing amount of data that companies can capitalize on for best benefits. Some of the top companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon are built on data. With some best practices, you can make the best of data to generate better value to customers.

Customer Success and Data

Digital customer success needs data. Customer success metrics and customer retention requires the right data set. It boils down to having a data-driven business center. You must keep the customer objectives in the center and demonstrate metrics as per that. With data, you can understand important aspects like-

• Are customers happy with your product?
• Are they satisfied with your prices?
• Is the response time bad or optimum?

To give your customers an amazing experience and foster customer success, you need to have a data-driven customer success program. Apart from that, data-driven customer success can-

• Automate how customer success metrics are collected
• Measure the impact of customer success processes
• Streamline customer journey
• Alert customer success teams about opportunities and risks

What is a Data-Driven Customer Success Program?

A data-driven customer success program is one that shows a holistic view of the customer by collecting information across various data points and centrally storing them to induce insights. This system allows you to see clear visual insights from your data by combining information from various points of the customer journey. You can see what your customers have a problem with, which part of the product they are stuck with, and then act on that immediately.

Why is Data-Driven Customer Success Important?

It has been noted that firms with a data-driven customer success operations enjoy nearly 93% more annual improvement in customer retention rates and an equally or greater improvement in net promoter scores. Customers will retain their relationship when they have a great experience. You can know whether they had a good experience or not only with data. Data-driven CS companies also see an increased spend over time due to tracking where growth can occur for clients in the customer lifetime.

Data-driven businesses have been more successful than others. This is because tech-touch ops are intertwined in data. From acquisition, value to what we showcase, data is present. This data is then connected to actions in an optimized environment. This has led to faster meeting of OKRs. Decision making is based on known facts. This can help make big decisions.

“I believe the data revolution is behind us. Data is now universal. Access to data is not an advantage. Its what you do with data that makes all the difference. And this is the data intelligence journey with the customer at the center.” – Prithwi Dasgupta, CEO SmartKarrot

Data collection Points in a Customer Journey

• Marketing team information
• Sales team information
• CRM information: contact, lifecycle stage, notes, doubts, interactions
• Product usage: in-app usage data that tracks how customers behave
• Support: incidents of support like ticket type, volume, resolutions, time to resolution etc.
• Financial: billing information, contract information, contract length, renewal schedule, invoices, discounts and payments
• Feedback: CSAT, NPS, and other customer feedback agencies
• Interactions: emails, Calls, chats, messages, and more

The Maturity Curve for Customer Success Teams

These stages show how data usage can make a customer success team scalable and effective.

Reactive

Here a customer success team has the data about customers. The data has not been put to any use as such though. In this stage, customers are directly contacted to resolve issues one by one. So if a customer is facing a problem with using a product, you will contact them to solve that escalation and meet their customer needs.

Insights

With data, customer success teams can map out available data to find out actionable insights and chalk out better paths. The insights of the customer success data will help devise prescriptive playbooks and reports.

Actions

These reports and data can be translated into proactive action across the customer lifecycle. This action aspect can include – calls, messages, sorting their issues, making product adoption easy for them, mailing them and more.

Outcomes

With these reports and playbooks, your customer success team can drive business outcomes in a proactive manner. With a prescribed framework, you can manage business outcomes.

Transform

Here in this stage, the goal is to transform the organization with customer success. The entire organization becomes customer centric. Every team from sales, marketing, to design works keeping the customer in mind.

Benefits of Data-Driven Customer Success

Customer success platforms helps businesses monitor and predict customer behavior, customer lifecycle management, and unearth insights.

Account Behavior usage such as product details- activity, module usage, feature usage and more becomes linked and easy to comprehend.

You understand the customer even more- location, stage, industry, contacts, frequently asked questions, invoice and revenue history.

Customer feedback becomes easy to understand. You have access to the sentiment of customer interactions, strength of product use cases, customer profile scores, net promoter scores, customer effort scores, and customer satisfaction scores.

Predicting customer behavior is possible- if a customer has not logged in, if a high-value customer has more than 3 outstanding tickets, if there is a low NPS, etc. You can automate alerts to push vital information to CSMs and focus on account health in a timely manner.

Bottom Line

Data-driven customer success is not just collecting data. It is more than tracking and collecting data. It is necessary to enable converting customer data into actionable insights. You can understand key features of the product and customer behavior. Data driven CS firms can drive better loyalty due to access to more valuable information. This can also help boost customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty.

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