Customer success is typically associated with SaaS businesses, helping companies grow and retain a customer base that can cancel and switch providers easily.
But, SaaS companies are not the only ones using the subscription business model.
Take Global Capacity, a 15-year telecom company building Connectivity-as-a-Service. Like so many SaaS companies, they needed a way to really understand their 20,000+ business customers and grow their recurring revenue.
So how do telecom and other non-SaaS enterprise companies approach customer success? Mary Stanhope, VP of Marketing at Global Capacity, presented their best practices at Customer Success Summit 2016.
Milestones Do Not Define The Relationship
According to Mary Stanhope, their team historically had visibility into five major customer milestones:
But this wasn’t enough.
The team became suspicious when they noticed that several customers with seemingly similar journeys were hitting the same milestones with vastly different opinions on the service. They suspected the truth might lie outside the realm of their major milestones.
Customers Are Cats, Not Dogs
With the right amount of time and resources, you can train a dog to do exactly what you want them to do. Cats, on the other hand, are unyielding and will do as they wish and only engage with you at their own convenience.
Much like cats, your customers will never follow the exact customer journey you lay out for them and only reach out when they need your help. What Stanhope suggests is staying one step ahead by knowing the value they are experiencing during the times when the service is not obviously failing.
Mapping The Real Customer Journey
Through a combined effort of different internal teams and implementing Totango, Global Capacity uncovered huge opportunities using their customer usage and engagement data.
They found that 33% of escalations had triggered 2-3 prior warning events before a customer would call. One of these cases involved customers who were increasing their bandwidth usage and hitting close to their limit on multiple occasions. In the past, this would have resulted in reduced performance or outages for customers that were actually growing their service usage. Now, through a series triggers they are able to get those customers on calls with the account team and have grown several accounts using this method.
Learn more about Global Capacity’s journey to proactive customer management by checking out Mary Stanhope’s entire keynote presentation at Customer Success Summit.
Totango helps ALL recurring revenue businesses make their customer success more efficient, streamlined, and scalable. If you would like to learn more, schedule a demo today!
