Article How CS Data Can Improve Company-Wide Growth

As we head into Q3, the team at Quala is watching how the world of work is changing. It’s understandable that people are feeling strange reconnecting with their colleagues, in person after being in isolation. Some of us are going back to the office (despite being nervous about it), while others are embracing work from home for the long haul.

During this time of transition, data-driven decision making is critical. While everyone adapts to new ways of life, data is what empowers us to stay rational, grounded, and forward-looking.

Being CS leaders, we are called upon to help our customers navigate their day-to-day. The data that we collect is invaluable — so how do we use it to support our colleagues in marketing, sales, product development, and engineering who may similarly be juggling a lot of cognitive overload?

Here are some meaningful and impactful suggestions:

Learn the traits of your most valuable customers

Out of your customer base, which accounts are most successful and why?

Segmenting out your customer base can help you figure out what qualitative traits (geography, company size, stage of engagement) are most important for new customer acquisition. With this insight, marketing and sales teams can find similar audience profiles to target, and product teams can more efficiently prioritize campaign releases.

This perspective can also help individual CS team members make more of an impact in their roles. For instance, CS teams can leverage this insight to be more proactive in engaging customers for growth conversations.

Try it at your company:

• Segment your highest value customers
• Study their attributes — look for commonalities or trends
• Create a simple report summarizing your findings
• Share the report with your manager and team for feedback
• Ask to share your summary of findings with the rest of your organization

Make more use of conversational data

Speaking “human” is a powerful CS skill. But often, we’re bogged down in the language of work jargon. How can we be more human-centric in our communications?

Data can help. For instance, you can use Quala to tap into conversations that customer success teammates are using. Take a look at some of the conversations that are coming up, naturally.

Conversation data can help everyone at a company get aligned around a shared customer-driven communication style.

Try it at your company:

• Log into your main feed every day, so that you can keep an eye on conversations
• Participate in and comment upon discussions
• Save and export some of the more substantive and impactful comments
• Create a word cloud to visualize keywords and share the report with your team
• Work with your manager or team lead to share cross-functional insights within Quala
• Organically and naturally influence more positive, customer-driven conversations

Identify signals from noise

Are teams at your company on top of your customers’ needs?

One way that CS teams can drive more value is to identify challenges, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities before they become obvious. A simple step to achieve this goal is through automating triggers, so that you receive constructive alerts to follow-up.

For instance, you can create alerts that map back to your customer journey, tracking the process someone makes from completing an onboarding to getting up and running with software modules. The key is to identify actions that are meaningful to your business and will ultimately influence retention and upsell opportunities.

Using these signals, you can share informative insights with your sales and product development teams, to help set expectations and create more frictionless experiences.

Try it at your company:

• Work with your manager and team to build a list of meaningful interactions in your product — host a whiteboard session and invite teammates from other departments
• Create a map of how these interactions influence core business performance metrics, especially related to revenue and cost
• Create reporting that begins tracking these signals, on an ongoing basis
• Collaborate with your manager or team lead to share this reporting with others at your company

Last but not least

Data is a powerful engine for story-based discussions. Through customer-driven stories, people at your company can create a shared understanding and basis for reality. More importantly, you’ll all learn to speak the language of your customers — something we’re most proud of at Quala is seeing, first-hand, how we’re able to shape more positive discussions.

See how Quala quantifies what customers say and teams hear to ensure the success of your entire company.