Using the Power of Data to Transform Your Customer's Experience

Automatic Summary

Unlocking the Power of Data for a Superior Customer Experience

Hello, everyone! So today, we're going to talk about how you can harness the transformative power of data to elevate your customer experience, even if you're not an expert in data science or customer success yet.

Throughout my career as a customer success leader, I've assisted numerous SaaS (Software as a Service) companies in implementing strategies that lead to positive customer outcomes and optimal use of software for customer enterprises. And now, I'm excited to share these insights with you.

Unleashing the Impact of Data on Customer Experience

You've probably heard the phrase "The customer is king". This adage holds true across industries, regardless if you're a small business or a large corporation. Businesses are consistently searching for ways to deliver remarkable experiences for customers. And the secret behind delivering a memorable customer experience? Data.

Telemetry, the medical-inspired concept, is a powerful tool in your customer success and retention strategy. It can be as simple as the online sales records of a store indicating that most people who bought a white shirt also purchased blue jeans to go along with it, or as complex as a large corporation using multiple data points from varying sources to evaluate the health and behavior of the customers.

When applied to the SaaS world, where businesses thrive in a subscription economy, the utility of data is evident. Having the right data can significantly enhance the interactions with your customers at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Types of Data You Should Collect

Equipping your team with relevant data can improve selling techniques, identify customer health, and consequently, aid in personalizing and proactively managing customer interactions. But what is the "right" data to collect? Generally, it falls into three categories:

  1. Subscription data: This includes information about the customer's purchases
  2. Usage data: This keeps track of how customers use your product or service and any issues they might encounter
  3. Customer success insights: This includes insights gathered from your interactions with customers.

Understanding what these data points indicate can help businesses draw relevant conclusions and prioritize their resources accordingly.

Building a Data-Based Customer Success Strategy

So now that we know why data is important and what kind of data we need to collect, the next step is leveraging this data to build an effective customer success strategy. This process can be broken down into four steps:

  1. Identify key health indicators for customers
  2. Define the thresholds for these metrics
  3. Make the data available for your success team
  4. Equip your team to use this data.

Segmenting your customers into different groups or categories based on your findings, predicting outcomes for future strategies, and building a digital customer success motion are ways this data can be fully utilized for customer success.

Emotional Intelligence in Using & Delivering Data Insights

Equally important as utilizing data is delivering insights to your customers in a strategic and emotionally intelligent manner. Emotional intelligence is a skill that transforms how you interact not just with your customers but also with your internal stakeholders. This skill can be developed, and it's instrumental in ensuring the effective delivery of data insights.

To wrap up, remember to harness data and emotional intelligence for a superior and personalized customer experience. If you have any questions or need further assistance, feel free to connect with me. I'm more than happy to share additional tips, methods, and resources. Let's continue to use data to deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.


Video Transcription

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session and thank you for joining in. My name is Joe Cla. It's pronounced without the Y in case you're wondering. So, I'm Joe and I'm joining you tonight from Australia.And we are going to be talking about how you can utilize the power of data to elevate your customer experience. Now, this is going to be a very high level overview. So you don't have to be an expert at data science or at customer success in order to follow the session. I'll tell you a little bit about myself before we begin, I am a customer success leader and I currently work as a senior customer success manager with it. I, and over the last 10 years of my career, I've helped s a companies implement and deliver strategies that lead to positive customer outcomes and optimal utilization of software for customer businesses. I really look forward to sharing my thoughts with all of you today. If you have any questions at any point during the session, please feel free to place them in the chat and I will take them at the end of the session. All right, let's get started So we are going to cover what is telemetry it's used in customer success. How do you collect data and where to get started and then using data to build an effective customer success strategy. And at the end of the session, we'll talk about the importance of exercising emotional intelligence while delivering and using data for your customers.

I'm pretty sure you've heard this at some point in your careers. Customer is keen. It's a good old saying and I think it continues to hold no matter what industry you work in. You know, whether you're a mom and pop shop or you're a multimillion dollar corporation. Businesses are constantly looking for ways to wow their customers and create delightful experiences for them. And believe it or not, data is the key to a customer's kingdom equipment. Your team with the right data is not only going to help them with what to sell, how to sell and who to sell it to, but also to really elevate their interactions with customers at every stage of the customer life cycle. And that is what is going to keep your customers coming back to you for more and more and more. So, I'm going to introduce you to the term telemetry, which is an important and effective tool in your customer success and retention strategy. So first things first, let's talk about what is telemetry, the origin of this done? Interestingly is actually medical if you've ever been to a hospital, you know how they attach you to a device that's got a monitor that displays all of your vital stats on the screen, your hydrate your oxygen saturation, your pulse, your temperature.

It's all up there on the screen in real time for your doctor and his team or her team to watch. And that helps them determine any drastic changes to your vital signs that are going to need their attention. So basically, it's a summary of how you're doing at that point in time using a few metrics that are indicators of good or bad health that in a nutshell is telemetry. Now, the geniuses of the software world have taken inspiration from this concept to collect, analyze and use data to give us the vital signs of health for our customers. And this could be as simple as a store looking at their online sales records to say that most people who bought a white shirt also bought blue jeans to go along with it. So those two products sell well together or a big corporation using multiple data points from different sources to assess the health and behavior of their customers. It could be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. Now, when you apply this to the world of software as a service where businesses are continually thriving in a subscription economy, how does it work? Then wait, first, let's take a step back. Let's talk about subscription economies for a subscription economy.

It trend of companies shifting from the traditional paper product model to a subscription business model. So basically, instead of charging a one time fee for your product, you offer a recurring subscription to your consumers in exchange for access to a product or a service over a period of time. And by signing customers up in subscription services, companies can actually extend their relationship beyond just one transaction into a longer term engagement. And in the software industry, the rule of these subscription economies has led to decrease success functions. And these are seen as the backbone of renewal retention and expansion for customer accounts. So this is a group of people that helps to ensure that customers are well on boarded, well adopted and hence well retained. And when you're building out your customer success function, equipping your team with the right data is really important. It's going to really, really, I'm sorry, I think the most slide a bit too fast. It's really, really going to help them sell better. It's going to give them the signs of healthcare customers and read those signs that the customers display whether they're looking good or bad. And in a nutshell, really help andre actions with customers in a more personalized and more proactive manner, right?

So if you're looking to equip your team with the power of telemetry statistics, the first question that comes to mind is what kind of data do you collect? And I sort of divided that for you into three broad categories. So the first category is subscription data, this is data about your customers purchase, you know, the company, what kind of business model do they follow? Uh where are their headquarters? Uh What kind of money are they spending with you on a monthly or an annual basis? Who are your champions? Who are your exec buyers? Who are your key users? Where are these people located? So basically a mix of qualitative and quantitative information that gives you deeper insights about the business and the people at the customer side that you're going to be working with.

The second one is usage data. So this would be things like how many licenses are they using? Are the ones that they purchased? How many users and how many times have those users logged into your platform during a certain period? You've got your help test data such as the number of support tickets that they've raised, that's going to give you an idea of what kind of issues they might be running into, you know, or whether they're consuming resources um in emails that you send to them or you know, resources from your website, white papers, et cetera that you publish and you know, any other channels that, that give them the chance to sort of dive deeper into your product and what it does.

And then most importantly, a lot of the kind of meetings that they've had with different departments. Have those been escalation meetings and those being exact business reviews. Are they regular checkings with your customer success teams are the road map sessions with your product team that also feeds into the experience that you're having with your product. And then we've got a third category, which is the most important one, which is insight from the customer success in counseling. So what do you gather from your conversations with your customers? Because look honestly, sometimes what happens is customers could be looking all healthy in your dashboards and you know their metrics could all be in the green zone. But if you sense something during your interactions with them, it is worth adding to the health chart. OK, remember nothing and I mean, absolutely nothing can trump the human connection that you make with your customers. So it's very important to take that into account while analyzing their health, right? So we collect subscription data, we collect usage data and we collect human input, which again is the most important we've talked about why we need telemetry. What kind of information we can collect? Now, let's talk about how we apply it. So where do we begin?

And look before I tell you this, I wanna tell you that you don't necessarily have to have a huge 56 figure budget to start doing this. If you're a big organization with a budget to start investing in a data strategy for your customers, I would say that that investment is absolutely every bit worth it for yourself and your customers. But if that's not the case, and you still want to start somewhere and scale using data tools at a later stage, it is completely possible to start simple. And what I've done is I've prepared a very high level step by step, overview of how you can start utilizing telemetry data. OK? Let's get started. Step one, identify the key signs of help for your customers. So what this involves is finding metrics that indicate good or bad customer health. OK. And let's not use a whole thing of information. Let's say you pick three metrics that are most relevant for you to start with. And these could be simple things such as, you know, let's utilization login count and let's say number of reports that users have downloaded in the platform that you offer.

It could be very platform specific, but start with three or four that make most sense to your software, to your product and to your business. OK? Once that's done, the next step is to define thresholds as to what good, moderate that these metrics look like, right? And then a lot of signals such as colors, red and the green thresholds to these so that they become easier to read for your team. And your team knows when a customer stats are in the so called danger zone or even before they go in the danger zone that helps your team prioritize which customers need their immediate attention, right? So you've got all of this step three is going to be able to make this data, data available to your customer success team. It could be in a report, it could be in a dashboard or in a what it could just be part of your existing account plans. And if you guys don't do account plans, this is a signal to start doing them. And again, like I said earlier, these things can be hard to scale manually. It could be a vast amount of data when you look at all your customers, even if you're looking at two or three metrics. So you may want to start out for a subset of customers and then display that data in your account plans if you're starting out manually.

And then the last step, once you've got all of this is equipping your team to use this data and I'm going to cover how to do this in more detail in the next couple of slides. Stay with me guys. I hope I'm not making you fall asleep. So how do you draw relevant conclusions from the data that you get? And what are the different ways that your customers existing could be utilizing them, you know, so just giving you sort of different dimensions that they could be thinking in the first one. Obviously, you know, data helps you be more informed so they can go from being reactive to being proactive in the way that they serve your customers. Like I said earlier, it's going to really elevate their interactions when they use data to identify either pain points or areas of improvement. And that really adds value to your discussion with customers, right? You can also use this information to segment your accounts into groups or categories and look because the learning from different customers in the same segment could be applied across one another. This really helps your customer success teams again, be better equipped to deal with your customers.

And sedimentation is key to prioritization, right. The third thing is predicting outcomes that drive expansion opportunities. So this would be up sales, cross sales, et cetera. And not only that it could also be engaging threats to renewal, you know, data helps your team more accurately in predicting the customer's future purchasing decisions and willingness to buy. And it also enables your team to provide more sort of accurate insights into how individual c life cycles can drive revenue. And then the last point that I mentioned here is building a digital customer success motion. Customer success is not just for your higher revenue or strategic accounts, you can actually use the power of data to scale your customer success practice and cover all of your customers. And this holds true even for businesses who have very high touch engagements across large deal sizes, your digital customer success motion can actually target customers with similar metrics and you can use them in mass outreach strategies such as webinars, email campaigns, et cetera.

And that's going to help you achieve personalization at scale. Now, that is really leveling up your engagement strategy, right? All right. We're close to the last part of our presentation and I want to focus on the delivery of insights that you receive from data to your customers.

Again, part of equipping your team to use that, that data that's made available to them. And that is where your emotional co comes into play. Remember, we're living in of information overload. And so are our customers knowing what you know is one thing knowing when and how to convey it to others is a whole different skill set. I believe the same data can have different meanings for you and your customers. And honestly, it can be very tempting to tell them all that, you know, at once, present it all to them at once. But I think that doing it at a time and in a situation where the information would make more sense to them is the key to being effective with your customers and look emotional intelligence, I think is a skill that no matter what role you're in and irrespective of whether it's a leadership role or not, uh it's an important skill to have, but I just think that it's just more true for someone in the customer success function because if you look at the foundations of emotional intelligence, things such as empathy, self-regulation, awareness, you know, active listening and motivation.

These are so central to someone who operates in a custom success role and these are skills that, that you interact, not only with your customers, but also with your internal stakeholders. So data alone is very powerful, but when you couple it with strategic delivery, using emotional intelligence, that is what is going to help you in being optimally effective in your customer interactions and create win win situations for everyone, your customers, your company, your own career.

And I think some people find that they're very naturally, emotionally intelligent while others may feel it's not their strong suit. But either way the good news is that this skill can be developed. So even though this is supposed to be a discussion about data, I'm going to leave you with a few books and resources about emotional intelligence in the chat because I think that that is really the key to unlocking the delivery of your data insights. And that brings us to the end of the presentation. I am going to look at the questions in the chat. Now in a second, could you show again the slides with the steps, please? Of course, I can, I can share a copy of the presentation with you Paul if that's OK. Do you want me to do that or do you want me to share? OK, perfect. Yeah, I'll share the presentation with you later? Cool. Just reading some of the comments here, there was some connection issues. I, I hope you guys were able to hear me. All right through the rest of the session. Awesome, great. Perfect. Yeah, absolutely. Everyone who is asking for a copy of the presentation, I'm more than happy to share it. Just drop your emails in the chat or you can just connect with me on link and I'll share the presentation with. Perfect. Thank you, Maria.

I really, really appreciate you guys being here. I appreciate all the comments and everyone who's dropping their email in there. I will make sure I share the presentation with you. Thank you so much guys for joining me. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.