Are your customers satisfied? Prove it.
If your company is looking to ensure clients are achieving the outcomes they want from your products and services, you can count on customer success managers to tell you the truth. Distinct from customer service and account management, those specializing in customer success proactively work to assess the health of various client relationships, diagnosing small issues before they become bigger problems and informing the kind of larger strategy that can mean the difference between your company’s success or failure in the long run.
In order to demonstrate the value of your products and services — and, just as importantly, to sense when a client’s needs aren’t being met — CSMs have at their disposal a mountain of data. Engagement, revenue, retention, usage, and other metrics can all yield valuable, real-time insights into a client’s relative satisfaction, which could be the secret not only to minimizing customer churn but also to maximizing upsell opportunities with a client down the line. Making sense of all that data is no easy task, but its importance to nurturing long-lasting client relationships cannot be overstated.
Just ask Mallori Teden, senior customer success manager at Datadog, who tracks various metrics in order to monitor account health and keep clients happy. Never a secondary focus for the company, which sells monitoring services for hybrid cloud applications, gauging customer satisfaction through data is instead a key component of the business model.
“Datadog innovates with the customer in mind; we strive to make their lives easier,” Teden said. “We preempt observability challenges and then solve them at a very fast pace.”
Accurately assessing how likely a customer is to end or renew their contract can be tricky, but Teden adds that analyzing data on account health can be useful in more ways than one to companies like Datadog.
“Tracking customer-centric metrics helps strengthen the traction Datadog can gain within an organization,” she said, “clearing the way for technical teams to be proactive and focus on revenue-generating activities rather than putting out fires.”
Below, Teden and customer success managers at two other companies with data-driven CS programs share their insights on leveraging data to keep customers happy.
Datadog is a monitoring and security system for cloud applications, offering unified, real-time observability of its clients’ entire technology stacks.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers? Are there any “outside-the-box” metrics you track?
We track a number of metrics at Datadog that are key indicators to the health of our customer base. Engagement metrics such as weekly active users, support tickets raised and continued product expansion and consolidation are all directly tied to the health of an account. We also track revenue metrics, such as monthly-recurring-revenue (MRR) trends over time and committed versus on-demand spend. These revenue metrics help our customer success team track when to reach out about a renewal or contract modification and help us prepare for the finance and budgeting conversations that inevitably arise.
On a customer-centric team like ours, it’s important that Datadog’s customer success managers are proactive in their account health management and track not only Datadog-specific metrics, but also business health metrics. In terms of “out of the box” indicators, it’s important to keep up with customers’ rounds of funding, mergers and acquisitions, and attendance to Datadog’s marketing or enablement events. Using these indicators to inform our decision-making gives us a wider lens through which to evaluate customer health on a consistent basis.
Which metrics do you prioritize in identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
The top two indicators we prioritize when identifying churn risks are low or decreasing weekly engagement in the platform and the question of whether we’ve lost our main point of contact or Datadog champion within the account organization.
A few other indicators our team looks for are decreases in product usage, a high ratio of on-demand spend to committed spend and a customer’s willingness, or lack thereof, to strategically engage with Datadog in relation to a longer-term partnership.
These indicators help our customer success teams, but they’re also a tool to help customers understand where their level of engagement falls in terms of our larger customer base. For example, we could tailor our outreach after noticing these indicators by saying “customers of X size typically engage with us on a monthly cadence” or “given X amount of on-demand spend, it could be time to look at your contract more strategically.” Additionally, if we’ve lost our champion at an account organization or we’re seeing a decrease in their platform engagement, this leaves an organization vulnerable to onboarding disparate non-standardized tools, which could ultimately lead to gaps in observability.
How do you use this data to tailor your re-engagement strategy?
I manage the relationship between Datadog and a customer we’ve had since 2017. In that time, I’ve noticed several churn risk indicators: we lost our main point of contact, their user count was low, they weren’t engaging with Datadog in any meaningful way, and their contract was out of date compared to their usage. Once I identified this account as a churn risk, I used LinkedIn to find new contacts within their organization and reached out with a message about billing optimization and updating their contract. While this customer is still on their month-to-month plan with us, we’re now figuring out together what a long-term partnership will look like.
Funding Circle is a small and medium enterprise (SME) loans platform that offers its clients a suite of flexible funding solutions, combined with dedicated account managers, to allow for a more seamless funding experience. Its investors and lenders include banks, asset management companies, insurance companies, government-backed entities, retail investors and funds.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
We track net promoter scores (NPS) at the time of funding and at key points during the borrower journey. We track net easy scores (NES) regarding ease of making a first payment, and we track complaints received from borrowers.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
A significant decrease in NPS, a low NES, or receipt of a complaint would trigger an investigation into the root cause of the borrower dissatisfaction.
How do you use this data to tailor your re-engagement strategy?
Once we have investigated and determined the root cause of borrower dissatisfaction, we build a plan to address the issue. We utilize tools such as interactive training with customer-facing teams, reference guides and calibration sessions with customer success agents to ensure that issues are understood and addressed, in order to prevent future recurrence.
PAIRIN is a social enterprise company with a platform that aims to connect individuals to career, education and support services using data from government agencies and employers.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
We track common metrics including bookings, retention, expansion, support tickets, active accounts, user engagement and customer satisfaction. Recently, we began tracking the click-through rate of support articles — something we hadn’t ever dug into before. This spurred a restructuring of our help center to improve the customer experience.
We also work with each customer to co-create metrics specific to them, which we report on regularly and include in our overall customer health scores. This ensures our product maps directly to an organization’s goals, and that we are pushing toward the impact that is most important to them.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
Four main categories make up our health score: project management, configuration and support, adoption and engagement, and customer-success pulse. Within these categories, we are looking at metrics including active users, feature usage and stakeholder engagement. If any of the categories fall into the orange or red range, it becomes our priority to address and mitigate the corresponding churn risk.
How do you use this data to tailor your re-engagement strategy?
As a customer success team, we collaborate on at-risk accounts monthly. Using the categories of our health score, we brainstorm together to create a plan for accounts that need re-engagement. For example, we had an account a couple of months ago that was really low in our project management category. In conjunction with our client account lead, we created a plan including scheduling targeted trainings, a board presentation and identifying success metrics for the second semester.
