Do you have a favorite business? Perhaps a local restaurant where you’re greeted by name and immediately handed your beverage of choice. Or maybe there’s an online retailer who provides quick shipping and goes above and beyond to correct any issues. Or it might even be your trusty handyman who always makes himself available when the refrigerator breaks or the kids toss a ball through the kitchen window (again). When you think about this business, it’s likely the first thing that comes to your mind is not the price of the items or services you purchase, but about how you feel when interacting with them. The happiness and sense of belonging when entering your favorite restaurant or the peace of mind knowing that your window will be repaired quickly and properly. That feeling is what keeps you coming back again and again.
Now, when you think about your business, how do you think your customers feel? Are they happy with your quick response time? Are they frustrated by slow fulfillment? Are they satisfied with your prices? Understanding your customers’ experiences and interactions with your company are key to retaining current customers, earning new customers and growing revenue. To truly dig deep into your customers’ experience, you need to implement a data-driven customer success program.
What is a Data-Driven Customer Success Program?
A data-driven customer success program provides you with a holistic view of your customer by collecting information from multiple data points across your organization and storing them all in one central location. It allows you to combine the information from several disparate systems in order to see a clear visual of your data, understand what your customers are facing and how they are using your product in response, and then to act on that information immediately.
Why is a Customer Success Program Important?
Between January and February 2020, international intent-based marketing firm Aberdeen surveyed 405 businesses from around the world and across companies of all sizes and industries regarding the key trends and objectives driving their customer success programs. Then, in May 2020, Aberdeen conducted another similar survey to gauge the impact of COVID-19. Based on the results of both surveys, Aberdeen gained several key takeaways, including:
- Firms with a data-driven CS program enjoy 93% greater annual improvement in customer retention rates and 94% greater annual improvement in a net promoter score.
- Customers retain their relationship with a business when they are satisfied with their experience interacting with that business.
- Data-driven CS leaders not only retain their clientele but also increase their spend over time, which is reflected through the 84% greater annual growth in customer lifetime value observed by these companies.
- Companies with data-driven CS programs improve (decrease) service costs by 5.1x more year-over-year compared to those without one.
- Firms with a data-driven CS program are 45% more likely to establish a single view of customer and operation insights and adopt hyper-personalization as part of their activities, whereas only 59% of their peers currently use account data to tailor customer interactions.
- Companies enjoy 40% greater year-over-year growth in their annual revenue through hyper-personalizing interactions across each stage of the customer lifecycle, which maximizes the likelihood that clients renew their spend with the business and share their positive experiences with their friends, family, and colleagues.
Aberdeen concluded that data-driven CS programs help firms create happy customers who, in turn, reward businesses with their loyalty. And while leaders today are data-rich, unfortunately, many struggle to achieve goals like retaining customers and growing spend. This is where a good customer success platform like Totango can help.
Why Totango is Key to a Successful Data-Driven CS Program
Aberdeen’s study found that 50% of companies use at least 10 channels to interact with their clients and they use multiple systems to capture data across those channels. These systems are often poorly integrated or not integrated at all. These companies also typically don’t have the systems used in sales, marketing, service, and commerce activities integrated with back-office systems such as billing. This disconnect makes it nearly impossible for companies to determine the root cause of customer churn or how customers are engaging with the product.
With Totango, however, you are able to pull in key customer metrics from across all of your data platforms into one single dashboard in order to gain a holistic understanding of your customer. This allows you to seamlessly integrate customer and operational insights so you can see what is happening across all platforms and take action immediately and within the same platform.
Totango can also help you to decrease costs because you no longer need quite as many human beings doing the rote work associated with your CS program. Instead, you can use the technology to automate stages of your customer journey and use your staff to handle just the things that the technology cannot do. This allows you to scale your business without scaling your team. A great example of this is Zoom. Since implementing Totango, Zoom has seen a 65 percent increase in customer health and currently has one single CSM managing 32,000 customers! This would not be possible without the expansive capabilities of Totango’s customer success technology.
Start Your CS Program Today
For more information about the Aberdeen study and how Totango can help maximize your customer success results, check out the webinar below. Ready to get started on your data-driven customer success program? Sign up for Totango for free today at totango.com/signup
