Totango's $8 million investment led by BGV

Tel Aviv-and-San Mateo-based customer success startup Totango has roped in a new $8 million Series C funding round, the company announced Wednesday. The round was led by Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) with participation from existing investors Pitango, Canvas Ventures and Interwest Partners.

Their software picks up data about a company’s customers and can monitor customer health for companies in the tech space, making them a great tool for customer success folks.

And what the hell is “customer success” you might ask?

It’s more of a proactive approach to customer service and customer experience, checking in on clients and asking them how things are going with a given product or service.

The way the industry refers to “customer service” is as something more reactive to individual problems, the type of thing that comes up from time to time and you would ring support to help solve. Customer success managers are tasked with keeping a constant watch on products, services and clients almost in the same way a waiter might come to check how everything is at your table in a restaurant.

Dan Schreiber, VP Customer Success at BIScience, describes the field as, “combining the technical traits of Customer Service and consultative approach of Account Management.”

“The CSM (customer success manager) will take a proactive role in maximizing the utility of the product their client is using,” Schreiber tells Geektime. “It’s a win-win situation, when we accompany our client through their use of our product so they can reach their goals.”

“Today’s customer success executives are expected to deliver predictable revenue outcomes from their cloud businesses, constantly improve team efficiency, and prove their products’ ROI to survive,” said Totango CEO Guy Nirpaz in a statement. “We are excited for Eric and his team at Benhamou Global Ventures to share their expert guidance as we make customer success operations more efficient and drive positive revenue impact for our customers.”

Totango touts Act-On, Autodesk, Amplitude, Pandora, Clarabridge, Zoom, TrackMaven, QUMU and Trustpilot among its own clients, which you could imagine should have a pretty strong relationship with a company doing this kind of business. The company also runs an annual conference called the Customer Success Summit, which they say drew 1,500 attendees in 2016.

BGV’s founder and general partner Eric Benhamou, who will join Totango’s board of directors, put the reason behind his investment in somewhat frank terms by saying that “Enterprises’ reliance on SaaS and Cloud products is peaking and we see the need for customer success technology.” In other words, there are a hell of a lot of SaaS and new kinds of services picking up customers in the market, but to stay ahead of the game, those companies are going to need to keep a hawk’s eye on their products and understand if their current clients are eager to stay on in the future.

There are a lot of software companies in the industry that compete with Totango. Some of those are Amity, Azuqua, ClientSuccess, Evergage, SkillJar, Wise and Woopra.

“We have identified Totango as the most complete customer success solution on the market and an early leader in the enterprise space,” Benhamou continued. “With their significant traction and incredible industry knowledge, we are confident in their efforts and will provide our expertise to help them navigate this period of significant growth.”

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Originally published at http://www.geektime.com/2016/09/14/pitango-backed-totango-shows-is-can-do-the-fandango-after-8-million-investment-led-by-bgv/