What is Customer Success Analytics? How is it different from Product analytics?

“Data is what you need to do ANALYTICS, information is what you need to do BUSINESS”

Aren’t we all governed by data and interpreted by analytics? From marketing to sales, organizations these days are using business analytics tools to derive meaningful insights to help grow their business. Sales professionals use business analytics to analyze the sales pipeline; detect any loopholes in the sale process, and raise sales performance.
Whereas, marketers are using business Analytics to analyze marketing campaigns and study consumer trends for responding well to the needs and demands of the consumer.
In a similar way, just as organizations are using data and analytics to acquire customers, businesses these days are adopting customer analytics to retain customers.

In this blog, we will describe how customer success teams can derive value from analytics and how customer success analytics will enable them to improve the growth of their organizations.

Infusing Analytics into Customer Success 

According to a Harvard Business Review report, 50% of companies aim to improve customer experience with data and analytics. Up to 40% of companies surveyed said they’ve been able to achieve this, so there’s still a gap of 10 percentage points between aspiration and reality, and half of all companies aren’t pursuing the Customer Success benefits of analytics at all.

In between the missed opportunity, there lies the catch of using analytics for Customer Success Teams. Let us look at the various game-changing valuable insights that could be drawn through Customer Success analytics to help determine the success of your business.

• Understand customers behavior
• Optimize customers’ use of products and services
• Increase retention/reduce churn by anticipating issues and identifying opportunities
• Proactively improve customer support
• Enhance knowledge-sharing and decision-making to drive growth

Obtaining a 360 view of customers

“The 360-degree view of the customer is critical for identifying where the customer is within their journey, knowing where they are today, what they want to achieve for their business, and what else we can do to help them get there,” 

– April Barnoy, the associate VP of customer growth at Sisense.

With customer success analytics CSMs can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, product adoption the pattern of usage of the tool. Coupled with this intelligence, CSMs can more easily understand what their next best action should be, what risks and openings may arise in different customer accounts, and even forecast more accurately, so they can develop initiatives based on data that will reduce customer churn, increase retention, and boost growth. Analytics also enables CSMs to track the speed and efficiency of customer support and pinpoint ways to upsell and expand your existing accounts.

Customer Success Tools make this task easier. Features like Customer Health 360 comes with the benefit of providing insights into- 

• Timely & Accurate information about Customer Engagement
• Seamless Experience for you and your customers
• Customer Segmentation 
• Deep Insights into Customer behavior
• Predictive Analytics and Mapping

With  CustomerSuccessBox’s dynamic Customer Health Dashboard, you can derive immensely valuable revenue insights into every facet of the customer journey.

Tracking Data Throughout the Customer Journey

Utilizing customer success analytics intelligently begins with identifying what to track and how to track it. It is important to track data throughout the customer journey to have a complete picture of your customers’ needs. It is always the easiest to take all the data points that you have across all systems, but this just creates noise and unnecessary work. Your team should take note of isolated data points that indicate individual victories or failures, as well as what they say about the customer’s overall experience. Different types of data become more valuable during different stages of the customer journey (note that stages may overlap):

• Onboarding: The onboarding stage is your team’s chance to make a great impression. The more efficient your process, the better. As such, important metrics to track during onboarding typically include things like time between milestones and adoption.
• Adoption: The adoption stage of the customer journey is also called the growth stage. During this time, your team should be keeping a close eye on key adoption metrics like how much time customers are spending with a product and feature adoption rate.
• Renewal: During the renewal stage, it’s important to prioritize at-risk renewals. Customer renewal rates and churn rates are obvious KPIs here, but it is also important to track things like customer behavior continuously—not just 30-60-90 days before renewal.
• Escalation: When a customer reaches the escalation stage, the most important thing your team can do is help the customer feel heard and help them find a satisfying solution. The second most important thing they can do is to learn from the experience. The best way to do this is to track data related to important factors like the cause of the escalation, what warning signs might have been present prior to the escalation, and how quickly and effectively the escalation was handled by your team.
  Customer Success is everyone’s business, not just the CS team’s, so escalation handling may be a cross-team effort. Product gap escalations will involve the Product team, for instance.

Tracking the right data at the right time is a vital component in crafting a successful business strategy, particularly for optimizing customer success. Knowing how to use that data, however, is equally as important.

What is Product Analytics and why is it insufficient to draw data-driven insights for Customer Success Teams ?

So, Product analytics is basically going to analyze how users utilize your product features. It will provide you with predicted areas of product friction.

Businesses use Product Analytics to improve the user experience by identifying the problems faced by customers and resolving them.

Product analytic tool helps you analyze customer interaction with your product but misses out on many key aspects like-

1. Missing out on engagement opportunities
2. Missing out on key product insights etc

Read here to know about the drawbacks of product analytics and how the data-driven Customer success can help ? 

How can a Customer Success analytics tool help? 

A Customer Success Platform works the data driven way. It analyzes all of the data compiled by the different components of your product and sums them into a usable format. 

When you’re being data-driven in your Customer Success approach, CS platforms like CustomerSuccessBox allow you to access important information like:

• Customer health
• 360-degree customer views
• Product usage
• Deeper customer segmentation
• Lifecycle tracking

Customer Success platforms helps you onboard, retain and upsell your accounts. Some of this would be never possible with just your basic product analytics tool.

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