Totango Enables You to Ensure Your Customers Are Successful Using Your Services

Every product or service vendor wants their customers to be successful using their product/service, but how do they ensure that happens? Through management of the relationship and the customer’s use of their product or service. It’s not an easy thing to do and SaaS-based companies particularly are challenged with this problem because they sell based on subscription. Unhappy customer = no subscription renewal, so it becomes all about “customer success.”

Kaiser Mulla-Feroze, CMO of Totango, took some time to talk with me about the customer success market and what his company is doing to help. And to be honest, I didn’t realize there is an entire market around the concept of customer success for SaaS companies. Mulla-Feroze said that it started about ten years ago at Salesforce, where they were looking for ways to ensure their customers were successful using the Salesforce SaaS CRM platform. The SaaS business model has grown dramatically since then and every day we see more vendors out there offering not only SaaS-based applications, but even digital services where software use is a major dependency.

Totango is a company that is firmly rooted in the idea that it takes a lot more than basic account management to ensure the customers using your SaaS-based service are happy. Mulla-Feroze said Totango’s approach is different from other vendors in the space and it has a new product launch today that demonstrates it.

Mulla-Feroze said that the best way to scale your customer account management is not through traditional CRM-based account management where each account manager deals with a number of clients. Instead, he said the best way to scale is to focus on the customer’s journey using technology that can identify when it’s on track (or not). Consider that you expect customers who subscribe to a SaaS service to use it in a particular way, or that there is a typical journey from introduction to use that you expect to see take place. Your account management team can then deeply engage based on what your customers are or aren’t doing along this customer journey.

We always talk about having a customer-focused approach to everything we do in our business, and ensuring customers are successful using your SaaS-based service certainly requires this perspective.

Ensuring Customer Success with Totango

How does Totango help ensure customer success? By tracking the usage of the SaaS application and providing metrics and insights, along with a way to take action. For a quick technical view, this is simply a Totango script placed within the SaaS application, along with integration to other systems such as Salesforce CRM. Customer choose what things they want to track (because a lot of data is great, but more is not necessarily better). In fact, along with predefined metrics from Totango, this new release allows customers to define their own metrics to report on – the metrics that are often the most telling sign is a customer is happy or not.

The new release of Totango covers three key aspects of customer success management:

1. A complete set of health signals that identify if customers are happy or not.

1. Metrics for business results
2. Metrics for product usage
3. Metrics for service utilization
4. Metrics for Customer Satisfaction
5. Metrics for other customers touch points (support tickets, account payable, etc.)

The first three sets of metrics are the leading indicators of customer health, Mulla-Feroze told me. The last two are good indicators but they are reactive rather than enabling a company to be proactive. Some of the things that come with this include a Customer Health Console where you can create and segment customers by stages of their journey,  an early warning system that actively monitors health,  a customizable adaptive health model, and user-defined metrics that you can define based on your business and expectations.

2. Insights into Business – a new consumption model helps you convert all those insights you are getting into action. This comes in the form a new mobile application, that allows you to manage things from any where. Built for iOS, you get notifications and push alerts on customers that need your attention, along with full access to your customers portfolio.

3. A new productivity model. This comes in the form of a Customer Command Center, customized to the user’s role. Using the command center you can set up notifications, add certain accounts to your attention center to actively monitor, manage and prioritize tasks, you can collaborate and assign tasks to other team members and more.

Who Uses Customer Success Software?

Where in the organization does a solution like Totango sit? Who uses it? Mulla-Feroze said that many SaaS companies are creating Customer Success groups to specifically manage and support customers. But a solution like this is also used by Sales because it supports upsell and renewal tasks generally the job of Sales people. It also can be used by Marketing, who can leverage the insights for re-marketing and retention campaigns (remember that the role of Marketing goes well beyond the sale).

Totango isn’t the only company focused on Customer Success. A quick search revealed Gainsight, , Preact, and Sparked. Totango has been around for over four years and is one of the veterans in this industry with a customer base larger than most of the others ().  Forrester wrote about the Customer Success Solutions Market in October. Forrester analyst Kate Leggett said:

Subscription-based companies that want to preserve and expand their revenue stream must actively manage their customer relationships — and they’re only just realizing the importance of this new customer success management function. Forward-thinking companies will invest in customer success by: 1) articulating a customer success strategy and high-level measures of success; 2) forming customer success teams that have clear revenue goals for accounts under management; 3) de”ning and standardizing customer engagement processes for all tiers of customers; and 4) adopting solutions to help manage the disparate data used to monitor a customer’s health. “

 

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