How do you measure customer satisfaction?
The short answer: Salesforce dashboards.
Across LA, customer success leaders leverage customer data to better understand and consult clients, as well as keep a close pulse on customer health. For some leaders, this entails working closely with the analytics team so that customer success managers have access to interpreted data at their fingertips. For others, that means taking the time to train CSMs in SQL, Tableau and other data visualization tools.
Meanwhile, CS teams like LeafLink’s use a little healthy competition to get CSMs excited about data harnessing.
Becca Campbell, a director of client experience and support at the cannabis wholesale ordering platform, enlists her client-facing team members in an engaging challenge to build out Salesforce dashboards that best visualize customer data. Competition, Campbell said, motivates the team to better understand Salesforce. Afterwards, they shares best practices for displaying and utilizing data.
Besides helping CSMs do their jobs better, customer data also helps establish a common language between the CS team, the data team and the customer. According to the following CS professionals we spoke with, the first step to helping clients hit their goals is clear, data-driven communication.
Director of Client Experience and Support Becca Campbell said the CS team at cannabis wholesale ordering platform LeafLink are encouraged to share best data practices and work closely with the analytics team to generate unique customer reports. Salesforce dashboard competitions also motivate the team to do data research themselves.
How do you ensure your CSMs have access to the data they need, when they need it? What tools or technologies are you using to collect or analyze this data?
We start by getting our CSMs the data they need to help guide our customers with decision-making. After the team has access, they can easily and quickly assemble reporting for each customer. This reporting is made even stronger by working with our data and analytics team, who we partner with on strategy and to generate any unique reports for customers throughout the year.
When it comes to capturing and gaining visibility into how our team is using the data, we rely on Salesforce. Sisense has been great for reporting our data, and Mixpanel for analyzing data.
We start by getting our CSMs the data they need to help guide our customers with decision-making.”
How do you train your CSMs to improve their data literacy and ensure they feel empowered to leverage the data they have access to?
Our team ethos is development through experience. Each team member is encouraged to share best practices that have been successful with customers in the past. To foster this collaboration, we weave team member feedback into a range of activities, such as a quick overview in a team meeting, topic-focused sessions or self-initiated user groups.
For example, a team member recently developed customer projections that combine internal data and trends with external metrics. Her team members can lean on and reference this data as they discuss growth and scaling with their customers. Additionally, one of our senior client experience managers created a report that paired insights with data points across a customer’s journey. She then shared this with the wider team, including information on how to best leverage the metrics.
What specific steps have you taken to bake data into your culture and the conversations you have with members of your team?
One of the top themes I reinforce is that if we can show through data that something can evolve, such as a feature or internal process, let’s make change happen.
I encourage the team to bring proof points when making recommendations, such as the percentage decrease in support tickets from a given workflow. We also hold in-depth discussions about dashboards and reporting during our check-ins and one-on-one meetings.
One specific way the team has incorporated data is through our dashboard challenge. Each team member develops a Salesforce dashboard and we vote on whose is the best. I’ve found that injecting some team competition like this is a good motivator that also puts a spotlight on data as one of the pillars of our team.
Establishing clear data metrics allows SVP of Global Client Relations Lisa Polter-Tennant’s team and clients to share a common language when discussing goals. At fintech company Verifi, data is used to track effectiveness of a product, reinforce value to clients and identify areas for improvement.
How do you ensure your CSMs have access to the data they need, when they need it?
Data analytics are a critical component to our client engagement, retention and growth strategy. We work closely with our analytics team to define and constantly refine internal and external reports that drive visibility to both client and product performance. Relationship managers utilize a combination of self-service tools and canned reports that have been built out over time and maintained by our analytics team to support day-to-day client management, quarterly and annual business reviews, product adoption and optimization and strategic account planning. We also utilize SQL server for our data warehouse and single source of truth, along with Tableau and Excel to analyze the data.
How do you train your CSMs to improve their data literacy?
The business analytics team works closely with our relationship management teams to understand both staff and client reporting needs. The teams work together to define user personas, which guide report requirements and design. Our analytics team communicates updates throughout the development process, reviewing new reports with the relationship managers at various stages of creation, steadily building the RM’s understanding and mastery of the data.
The teams worked together recently on definition and creation of reports for Verifi’s order insight and rapid dispute resolution products. Relationship managers were asked to help define the client success metrics used to measure product effectiveness and value. This collaborative approach increases the team’s investment in understanding the data and how to most effectively use the reports to drive client satisfaction, retention and growth.
Data analytics are a critical component to our client engagement, retention and growth strategy.”
What specific steps have you taken to bake data into your culture?
Success metrics are well-defined and applied consistently with our clients, within our relationship management team and across the organization, driving alignment and visibility on shared objectives. The success metrics foster a shared understanding and common language across our teams and extend to our seller, reseller and issuer clients. We use data to track the effectiveness of our products, reinforce value delivered to clients, identify opportunities for operational improvement, gauge shifts in industry trends and forecast future activity. Data is critical to our culture and our commitment to continual improvement.
Head of Delivery and Customer Success Amitabh Biswal said CSMs, project managers and market researchers participate in extensive training programs in order to increase their data literacy at insights platform DISQO. Decisions aren’t made until data can back them up.
How do you ensure your CSMs have access to the data they need, when they need it?
Data-driven decision-making is core to leadership values at DISQO. It’s not enough to just embrace analytics; an organization and functional department needs to fully adopt the mindset of a data-driven culture. With the combination of several dashboards floated using SQL, Python and Tableau, the customer success team is enabled to access the data story around the key decision-making KPIs at any point of time. This allows the team to understand the revenue and strategic KPIs, prioritize the incoming client success delivery tasks and execute the tasks in an optimized fashion to bring maximum value.
Data-driven culture starts at the very top at DISQO.”
How do you train your CSMs to improve their data literacy?
CSM teams are solving complex marketing analytics problems of large client organizations and the products used are fueled with an enormous volume of client advertisement data layered with data science models and hi-tech statistical methodologies. Hence, data literacy is a core focus and we run extensive training programs to help market researchers and project management personnel within CSM teams enhance their skills through SQL, Tableau and other data visualization tools. Being in the business of creating value-added insights for our customers, the DISQO team is also trained to bake data into all important decision-making.
Data literacy has helped the CSM team to confidently field client needs by having easy and direct access to audience, segmentation, advertisement and behavior data. In addition, access to runtime metrics and KPIs like customer feedback, customer lifetime value, customer health score and adoption rates have enabled the CSM team to better understand the client needs. Additionally, they can strategize effectively to increase customer satisfaction, which results in more upsell and cross-sell opportunities and lower customer churn.
What specific steps have you taken to bake data into your culture?
Data-driven culture starts at the very top at DISQO. Ensuring leadership advocacy was the first step to baking data into our culture and was readily embraced by the C-suite. Then the KPIs (linked to OKRs) and metrics were chosen carefully: each data point was brainstormed, argued upon and finalized with absolute consensus.
Next came the task of democratizing the data across the CSM team and other stakeholder departments. The data analytics team worked with the CSM team to establish the dashboards reflecting the metrics and KPIs at runtime. Further, data visualization interfaces were created to enable the project managers and market research professionals to be able to access critical business data by themselves, thereby reducing the dependency on the analytics teams.
Then, the data team trained the rest of the CSM team on SQL and data visualization tools like Tableau. The team responded positively and agreed that having a data-driven culture was a value add for clients. Today, data-driven culture has seeped into the DNA of the CSM team.
