For recurring-revenue businesses, retention and expansion are the key drivers of growth. To drive success for both of these metrics, an accurate understanding of customer health is crucial. Essentially, the foundation of customer success is an accurate understanding of customer health.
So why are so many executives still measuring customer health with NPS scores, support ticket history, etc? As Shai Rybak, VP of Customer Success at Clicktale notes, “Customer health isn’t the same as customer satisfaction. You can have a good relationship with a customer, so they’re ‘satisfied’, but that doesn’t tell you how much value they’re getting from your solution.”
The reason limited views can’t give an accurate picture of customer health is because they focus on aggregating and viewing historical data, which by definition is historical, so it’s often too late to make necessary course corrections by the time there’s a red flag.
Given Totango’s powerful health capabilities, especially the Enterprise Health feature of Enterprise Edition, we thought it would be good to re-share our POV on customer health and what subscription-based businesses need to mindful of. There are three integral features of a customer health scoring model that must be in place to provide a real-time, complete customer context necessary for businesses to drive adoption, retention, and expansion. Let’s explore each component.
#1 – Active Monitoring of Real-Time Customer Data Streams
Customer health requires active monitoring of diverse, real-time streams of customer data. Imagine the difference in the data within a medical records repository and a Fitbit. The Fitbit has sensors that monitor vital signs and recognize patterns, proactively identifying potential problems and opportunities. Customer health must reflect changes in digital data streams for customers’ actions, behavior, and engagement. Monitoring allows businesses to get an accurate representation of the value customers receive from a product or service, helping predict the likelihood that a customer will churn and pinpoint a customer that needs to be nurtured or one that can be engaged as an advocate or for an upsell opportunity.
The data streams necessary to create complete customer context are diverse and all aggregated by the data architecture that powers Totango: DNA-CX™. DNA-CX connects all customer information and produces real-time insights for an accurate picture of your customer and their health. The unique, flexible structure of DNA-CX allows companies to define customer health on the data streams that are relevant to their business, from product usage to financial data, producing truly accurate health scores. The only alternative to implementing a monitoring paradigm is to build massive teams that can keep their fingers on your customers’ pulse all the time. This is a non-starter, so DNA-CX allows companies to provide exceptional customer experience at scale.
#2 – Customizable and Adaptive Health Scoring by Segment
In addition to real-time, proactive monitoring, businesses need their calculations of customer health to reflect their diverse, unique relationships with their customers. Therefore health definitions must be customizable and adaptive to their key business segments, based on a variety of factors such as business outcomes, lifecycle stage, product usage, license utilization, support tickets and other data. For example, the criteria of a healthy high-touch account would be vastly different than a low-touch account, or a customer who is in the onboarding phase as opposed to an established account. Without health definitions for each of their unique customer segments, a business is unable to optimize their proactive outreach and customer experience management.
To address this need, Totango extends its powerful segmentation engine to define health profiles, allowing businesses to create multiple profiles that segment their customers into natural groups that behave differently and create a separate health definition for each. Businesses can create as many customer profiles as necessary to accurately understand every customer in their portfolio.
#3 – Enterprise Health for Complex Account Hierarchies
For mid-to-large enterprises that have complex, sophisticated relationship structures with their customers, customer health needs more granularity. Being able to define and calculate health throughout the entire account hierarchy, including health across all sub-account levels like departments, business units, channels, and down to the product level, is critical.
Totango has developed the first and only product advancement that allows businesses to view health throughout the hierarchy called Enterprise Health. Parent-level health accurately reflects the health of all of its child accounts or products. It can be calculated two ways, as a weighted percentage of sub accounts or as a weighted percentage of contract value of sub accounts in your good, average, and poor health customer segments. Depending on the emphasis a business places on accounts with high-value contracts or aggregate number of accounts, the health score of the parent level of their hierarchy will reflect your preferred health model. Along with health throughout the hierarchy, Totango provides users with the reasons contributing to a change in health score for any level of an account hierarchy.
Peter Storer, Vice President of Client Operations, has launched Enterprise Health at Avero. He explains, “Only measuring account health at one level of the hierarchy doesn’t work for us. Totango’s Enterprise Health helps us measure a customer’s health more seamlessly across our complex hierarchy. This critical feature was simple to setup and start using in segments and will help us improve adoption of our multi-product suite.”
And what if want to change the way you calculate health because you redefine customer segments, data streams, or even the way you structure account hierarchy? Totango allows you to recalculate customer health for past time periods of up to 180 days.
Totango is #1 in Customer Health and Customer Success
When considering customer success management solutions, businesses must choose a solution that can support their complex, unique needs. The very basis of this support is an accurate understanding of the health of their individual customers, key business segments, and hierarchy, from parent account to product. Totango is the only customer success management solution that supports these sophisticated requirements, so request a demo today to see the power of Totango health monitoring, scoring, and enterprise hierarchy capabilities.
Andy @Userlane says:
Loved your discussion on customer success, especially your product advancement of Enterprise Health!