How to Gather Customer Insights with CS Software

Customer Success software helps your enterprise understand what matters to your customers. Being able to use your customer success data will enable you to better connect with your customers.

The reality of the unique relationship you share with your customers is captured in the data your customer success software gathers, detailing usage rates, demographics, logged interactions, voice of customer data, and other key metrics. By sharing the insights of these multi-dimensional data streams across your enterprise, you increase accountability for the customer experience and create a customer-centered enterprise that is poised to effectively deliver customer lifetime value. It all starts with knowing how to gather customer insights and properly leverage that data.

Understanding Customer Success Data

A customer success platform contains all the data needed to create a complete picture of your customers. It is a living repository of every customer engagement, product interaction, and touchpoint generated by your customer relationship.

This covers every aspect of the customer relationship, including:

• Financial: Contract and transactional data.
• Voice of Customer: Survey responses and satisfaction scores.
• Personal: Behavioral data and demographics.
• Product Usage: Features being used and frequency of use.
• Support: Help desk tickets and support status.
• Touchpoints: Logged interactions with anyone in your enterprise.

You can generate an overview of a customer’s satisfaction with your product by combining key metrics into a singular health score. This metric provides at-a-glance insight into a customer’s likelihood to renew and the stickiness of your product. Alternatively, you can use the customer success platform to delve deeper into specific metrics, such as adoption rate, in order to examine the factors that matter most to your unique customer.

This knowledge is essential to creating a customer-centered enterprise that can generate ongoing value for customers.

Using Customer Success Data to Achieve Your Goals 

The digitization of business has created a customer-centric economy dominated by subscription services and SaaS enterprises. It’s a customer-driven market that empowers short-term thinking and an expectation of personalized service. The bulk of customer revenue is now gathered through customer loyalty. As such, enterprises need to continually deliver value to customers in order to inspire loyalty.

Customer success data will keep you informed of your customers’ experience with your product at every step of their journey. From onboarding through adoption to renewal, you’ll be aware of exactly how your customer is using your product—and how you can help them maximize their investment.

Let’s take a look at how customer insights can help you during the major stages of the customer journey:

Onboarding

The onboarding process is all about giving customers the tools they need to integrate your product into their daily workflows. It is a critical first step, one that can define the customer’s attitude toward you and your product throughout their journey.

The data from your customer success software allows you to monitor and guide every step of the onboarding process. For example, you can track the time spent on customer training and measure this progress against historic expectations to understand where a customer is on their journey and how to proactively help them. Using Totango’s Customer Onboarding SuccessBLOC, you’re able to see if a customer is struggling within the onboarding phase. You’ll be provided with insights such as how many days a customer has been in the onboarding stage and any accounts that have been delayed in onboarding. Once a customer has completed onboarding, the Customer Onboarding SuccessBLOC will help you determine their CSAT score and product adoption post onboarding.

Product Adoption

With customer success software, it’s easy to track product usage. You should monitor metrics such as average time of login, frequency of product access, and new feature access in order to identify signs of positive growth or churn risk. You can customize your customer success software to alert you of fluctuations in product usage over any measure of time, be it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

As your relationship develops, these alerts provide insight into your customer’s journey and can let you know if any actions need to be taken.

Upselling

Unlike renewals, upsell opportunities are not tied to a specific timeframe. Rather, they are the result of the ongoing customer experience and the rate of customer growth. By monitoring measures such as product and feature usage and license utilization, you can identify if and when a customer would benefit from expansion.

If, for example, a customer has reached the maximum number of seats allocated to their account and is continuing to grow, it may be time to offer additional access. Conversely, if your customer success data is telling you that a customer is not frequently using a particular feature, you may consider more education initiatives.

Data-Driven Customer Success

Customer success software records every interaction within your customer relationship, making it easier to identify the next steps. By collecting data from every touchpoint you’re able to be proactive to your customer’s needs.

Used correctly, customer success software helps you showcase your product’s value for years to come. Totango offers customer success software that helps you gather key metrics and customer insights. Try it for free to gain a better understanding of your customers.