By Lauren Costella
Data. We hear and read about the importance of data all day and every day. However, are we as CS leaders and practitioners well versed in how to get that data within our organizations? And are we thinking through the key ways in which we should be using that data? How do we ensure that we aren’t overwhelmed by too much data?
I’m excited to share:
The top ways you should be using data to support your team and your customers
Why your internal data team is your new best friend
How, if you don’t have a data team, you can take steps to invest in one!
Let’s dive into how critical data is for your team and your customers.
Understanding how your customers are performing and the value they are receiving from your organization is the number one reason for getting your hands on data. If your customers aren’t receiving value, they churn, which significantly impacts the bottom line.
For example, you should be able to show customers how they are achieving their goals. Here at GoodTime, we show customers how they are performing against their time to hire and overall hiring goals. We can measure that through speed to interview; interview turnaround time, and many other metrics.
Another great way to use data is to offer deeper insights to customers, and it’s especially powerful to tie that back to usage within your product. For example, at GoodTime, we are able to show customers how certain usage levels tie directly to efficiency and speed in hiring, which is the primary reason customers purchase our solution.
The point here is that using data to understand and share with customers the value they are receiving is incredibly powerful, and perceived value is why customers renew and grow with your organization.
It goes without saying that data is also very important for understanding your team’s performance and their impact on the bottom line. More importantly, it helps each individual on your team understand how they impact the company. Every single team member should understand if they had a good day, a good week, a good month, a good quarter, a good year. Your data should help define performance metrics like: time to onboard, product adoption by customer journey phase, playbook impact on customer health, and so much more.
With the foundation of why data is so mission critical, let's talk about where you get this data. This is where I suggest working cross functionally with your data team. A data team can mean many things to many people and organizations, so it may be helpful for me to define the functional focus.
The people within a data team are responsible for getting data out of systems, providing insights around that data such that action could be taken, and helping to answer questions through data and insights. For instance, is there a correlation between product adoption and retention? Can we create a machine learning health score? This team may work with or even own the systems that house data. For example, they may have Sales, CS, or Marketing Operations in their group or work closely with them.
Our data team consists of a data scientist, a data analyst and our Sales and CS and Marketing Operations teams work closely with them for additional insights. Our data team provides us insights about our customers and our business for internal action but also provides our customers data directly so THEY can take action.
For example, internal insights help show us which customers could be attaining more value through adoption, and this allows us to target our conversations and communications to encourage it.
Externally, we’ve been able to share with customers not just their data, but benchmarking insights! We are able to show customers how their performance compares with customers of similar size, stage, industry, and more. These types of insights make us an invaluable partner because they wouldn’t have access to this on their own.
The important takeaway here is that we don’t gather all of these insights and provide this value on our own as a customer team. We need specialized roles within our organizations to help us! If you have a data team in your organization, I suggest creating regular time to meet with them and work through how you can get what you need. We meet about every other week with this group, and we use our Level 10 meeting structure to address needs. When you start meeting with your data team, you’ll likely find that it will take time to organize your data. I suggest putting resources against this effort as a quarterly company initiative.
All of this may be great, but what if you don’t have a data team? There are a couple of solutions to this. First, I suggest talking with your CEO, Board members, and investors. Oftentimes, investors have access to data scientists in their venture or private equity firms. They can and do offer those resources to help their portfolio companies, especially if this help could lead to better business results (like higher net retention). For example, they may be able to help you with connecting usage data with customer retention, and that data point alone can really help drive where to focus CS team efforts to drive results.
Secondly, make data your next investment! I suggest starting with Customer Success Operations first. A simple way I like to present the importance of CS operations to strategy team members is to compare it to Sales. You would never have an AE running your Salesforce data, so we shouldn’t be asking our CSMs to be running our Customer Success data? I also like to focus on team performance to make the case. If we don’t know our team’s performance, we can’t improve it.
As CS professionals, we hear about data all of the time, but oftentimes, we feel alone in figuring out how to access it and use it to advance value with our customers. I am here to remind you that you don’t have to do it alone! Utilize your data team! They are and should be your new best friends. If you don’t have a data team, use your investors! They can help in the short term, and then make data specialists your next investment!
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that helps leaders build and develop top performing customer success teams. We offer modular consulting engagements that can kick-start your planning efforts, as well as coaching for leaders who need some weekly advice. Check out TheSuccessLeague.io for details.
Lauren Costella - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. When she’s not working as the VP of Customer Success for GoodTime.io, you can find her serving as an advisor for The Success League, a board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging on the CS Playlist. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University. She was a former USA National swim team member and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.