When Scout Analytics was acquired, and support of its flagship product ended, Infopro Digital’s Insight publishing division needed to find a new customer success management platform and implemented Totango. Infopro gained much greater insight into customer success and engagement with Totango, which allowed it to maintain a high subscription renewal rate and automate workflows, making the sales team more productive.
Infopro Digital’s B2B publishing division offers an online subscription service providing content, data, and newsletters to financial services and insurance companies, helping those clients stay on top of industry developments and competitors. “Think of it as the Financial Times on steroids,” says Hernan Geberovich, Senior Digital Insight Manager. While Infopro Digital is headquartered in France, the Insight B2B publishing division has offices in London, New York and Hong Kong.
For several years, the fast growing division used Scout Analytics, a Seattle-based provider of predictive analytics for subscription businesses to evaluate client success and engagement with Infopro Digital’s content and newsletters. Scout Analytics wasn’t user friendly nor did it really provide the insights the Infopro Digital division needed.
Geberovich spent time daily turning raw data Scout provided into reports he would then send to the sales team. To automate the process, he created five templates that covered about 95 percent of the use cases of his team. But much of the data was raw, therefore it didn’t offer real insights into what was really happening with the customer..
Engagement metrics, for example, was only presented as “positive” or “negative”, and to learn a client’s status, sales had to check each account one by one.
“We enriched Scout with our own databases and it had a lot of data in it, but there were no insights into accounts and whether they needed attention,” Geberovich says. “I was extracting data daily and processing it on the fly, and then putting the data into the CRM, so I was doing all the work. I automated much of the tasks but it was still taking a long time every day.”
“It wasn’t a very smart way to work,” he adds.
When Scout Analytics ended support of its flagship product, Geberovich looked for a new business analytics package but couldn’t find one that provided the type of customer information he needed.
Further research led him to software specifically designed for customer success with subscription and recurring revenue streams, and to Totango’s real-time Customer Success Management Platform.
He chose Totango because it automates account tasks and workflows, measures account health in-depth, and for the way it manages the lifecycle of subscriptions and engagement.
Totango’s customer success technology connects multidimensional customer data streams, at any stage of readiness, in real-time to provide high-definition customer context so enterprises can understand the health of their entire customer portfolios. Totango helps corporations focus on the customers that need the most help, automates workflows, and provides customer segmentation and revenue forecasts.
At Infopro Digital’s publishing division, the 30-person sales team is responsible for bringing in new business as well as renewing some 2,000 plus customer subscriptions. They accomplish this by looking for ways to upgrade customers, by analyzing customer engagement with a product, and by segmenting customers.
A health score allows them to prioritize their work and a poor score can trigger them to reach out to the customer on a timely basis. All this information was hard to determine with a simple positive or negative response they received in Scout. In addition, Scout didn’t have automated features to help them manage their workflows.
Infopro Digital uses a restrictive health definition criteria in Totango that translates a good health account to mean the account is doing really well, and potentially primed for upsell opportunities. A poor health score triggers sales to reach out to clients before lack of engagement turns into non-renewal.
With Totango, the digital publishing sales team is more productive, has instant access to insightful account data, receives reports with much more meaningful data automatically, and has much improved insight into customer health. “Critically the data is actionable,” he says.
Totango’s platform provides automated reports with information such as renewal dates, subscription usage and other proprietary information that helps Infopro determine customers in poor or good health. They don’t have to check accounts one by one, but save time with automated reports that alert them when accounts slip into poor health.
Best of all, they don’t have to rely on or wait for Geberovich to process and try to interpret the data for them. Meaningful data is available at their fingertips whenever they want it.
“My role changed a lot,” Geberovich says. “Totango has freed up a lot of my time. Rather than managing the software, I spend more time finding opportunities and new ways for us to increase revenues with digital data.”
He estimates he saves a full day each week not having to extract data in Scout, process it and dump it into the CRM.
Now, he simply trains new users on Totango, and “off they go,” he says. Geberovich spends time analyzing the business rather than focusing on the technology required to run the company.
Quite a few more people use Totango than they used to use Scout, and account managers use it all the time, which shows it is worth their time, Geberovich adds.
When Infopro Digital created a new engagement role to better manage about 30 to 40 high-value accounts, the person didn’t have many tools to help him. But when the division implemented Totango, his job changed dramatically, Geberovich says.
“The manager was able to leverage campaigns and use segments cleverly,” he says. “That team grew and now we have four people in that role. Their contribution to revenues is really significant and big part of that is because of Totango.”
Infopro Digital’s financial publishing division has always enjoyed a 95 percent subscription renewal rate thanks to the valuable insights it offers its clients. But as the division grew by double digits annually for the past four years, executives wanted to maintain subscription numbers.
“Without much insight in Scout, it would have been fairly easy to see a drop renewal rates as we grew. But Totango helped us maintain our renewals and even increase the rate slightly,” Geberovich says. He credits the division’s engagement team as a big reason the division maintained the high renewal rates.
“Without Totango, the engagement team wouldn’t have been able to contribute so much in just one year,” he says. “Now that I understand how much Totango can be customized to suit specific business needs, I have no doubt it can greatly improve the entire customer lifecycle. Totango helps create processes that are robust, smart and yield measurable results.”
