Customer success software helps your enterprise understand what matters to your customers. Being able to use your customer success data will help you better connect with your customers.
The reality of the relationship you share with your customers is captured in the data your customer success software gathers, detailing usage rates, demographics, logged interactions, voice of customer data, and other key metrics.
By sharing the insights of these multi-dimensional data streams across your enterprise, you increase accountability for the customer experience and create a customer-centered enterprise. Improving customer lifetime value starts with knowing how to gather customer insights and properly leverage that data.
Understanding customer success data
A customer success platform contains the data needed to create a complete picture of your customers. It is a real-time repository of every customer engagement, product interaction, and touchpoint generated by your customer relationship.
This covers every aspect of the customer relationship, including:
- Financial: contract and transactional data
- Voice of customer: survey responses and satisfaction scores
- Personal: behavioral data and demographics
- Product usage: features being used and frequency of use
- Support: help desk tickets and support status
- Touchpoints: logged interactions with anyone in your enterprise
You can generate an overview of a customer’s satisfaction with your product by combining metrics into a singular health score. This metric provides at-a-glance insight into a customer’s likelihood to renew and the stickiness of your product.
Alternatively, you can use the customer success platform to delve deeper into metrics, such as adoption rate, to examine the factors that matter most to your unique customer.
This knowledge is essential to creating a customer-centric or customer-led growth enterprise that can generate ongoing value for customers.
Using customer success data to achieve your goals
The digitization of business has created a customer-centric economy dominated by subscription services and SaaS enterprises.
To inspire customer loyalty, businesses must consistently deliver value to their customers.
Customer success data provides insights into every stage of the customer journey, from onboarding and adoption to renewal. These insights enable you to understand how customers engage with your product and identify opportunities to help them maximize the value of their investment.
How customer success insights help the major stages of the customer journey
Onboarding
The onboarding process is essential for equipping customers with the tools they need to integrate your product into their daily workflows. This first step shapes their perception of your product and sets the tone for their entire journey.
With data from your customer success software, you can effectively monitor and guide every stage of the onboarding process. For example, tracking the time spent on training and comparing it to historical benchmarks helps gauge a customer’s progress. This allows you to identify areas where support is needed, ensuring a smoother and more successful onboarding experience.
Product adoption
Customer success software makes it easy to monitor product usage and track metrics like average login time, product access frequency, and engagement with new features. By customizing alerts for changes in usage patterns —whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually — you can understand your customers’ journey and highlight when proactive steps may be needed to strengthen the relationship.
Growth
Unlike renewals, upsell opportunities are not tied to a specific timeline. Instead, they emerge from the ongoing customer experience and growth trends. By closely tracking product usage, feature adoption, and license utilization, you can pinpoint the right moment to offer an expansion.
For instance, if a customer maxes out the number of seats on their account and continues to grow, it might be the right time to offer additional access. On the other hand, if your customer success data shows that a certain feature is not being used, you could offer educational initiatives to help the customer realize its value.