According to a Harvard Business Review study, nearly 99% of respondents confirmed to become more data centric. Being data centric will help form better business decisions. This will also enhance a better data driven Culture in the company. If your customer success managers cannot make use of customer data, it is waste of the data. You need to ensure the data is tailored and possible for clients to use. By getting your CSMs the data they need, you are helping them with decision making. This will help generate unique reporting and better results. So in order to build a data-driven customer success team, you need to capture data and make to easy to understand. This will happen if you have a data driven customer success team.

How to Build a Data-Driven Customer Success Team

Hire Data-driven People

Hiring the right people with the correct mindset is important to influence behaviour. You need to recruit the right people since they know the first-hand importance of being data driven. Most people from data-based companies are naturally oriented to embracing data. They will get their skills and best practices to improve the business. They need to make sure data is collected well for better improvement. Understand their problem solving process and how they measure success. Being data-driven will help receive compelling insights to deliver better support. If you are scarce on resources like finance, you can bring sales, product, and support teams together to improve customer success and fine-tune collaboration.

Empower Customer Success Teams to Use Data Well

Hiring data-driven people alone is not enough. You need to ensure that they need to be empowered to use that data. If you get in the right people but the rest of the team is not capable of using the data, it will not be helpful. You need to provide relevant information about customers to the right people to help customers the right way. You need to suggest common workflows to identify potential issues, share resources, and avoid future problems.

Build Data Analytics into Your Company Culture

Facilitate data literacy by ensuring team members are well trained and understand data complexities. Make investments in training and ensure team members understand data importance. Building a data-driven culture does not happen overnight. It needs to be improved at a granular, cultural level. It needs to be a part of the organization’s DNA. It is not simply gathering data. You need to see how well the company embraces data and make it part of the company culture.

Consolidate Your Data and Make it Accessible

You need to keep your data accessible by consolidating it in one place. This can mean having a data warehouse or a tool like that. The tool needs to be chosen wisely so as to pipe all data, track events, track help desk information and extract data from CRM and production databases. Once that is done, you need to create a common code among company members. Though common Metrics like churn rate, revenue rate, and active users are known. It is important to keep the definition same across teams. To translate complex datasets, you can use fact tables. This will help understand data better. Have conversations around this to allow for participants to prepare and respond.

Measure Performance by Metrics

You need to measure individual, team, and company performance for better tracking. You need to set metrics and KPIs for measuring performance and productivity. In customer success, measuring customer satisfaction is important. This can be measured by tickets solved, customer satisfaction score and more. Measuring performance is important for understanding if your data-driven insights are working. KPIs can track data and offer better reports. This can mean operations metrics, conversations metrics, total conversations metrics and more. Information like time to first response, time to close, conversation rating, net promoter score, user metrics, number of active users, length of user sessions and number of user sessions needs to be kept in mind.

Improved Communication

If teams are not familiar with data processes, they can be quite confused. This can be helped with some important solutions. This includes attaching the description for the data, highlighting the guidelines, and establishing better streamlined processes. Better communication will also offer context to other teams so that they can grasp the importance of data. This means better conversations, informed decisions, and discussions about health, adoption, and customer success.

Best Practices While Building a Data-Driven Customer Success Team

• You need to make sure a dedicated customer success team is present. Also, you need to make sure customer success is an organization-wide priority and goal.
• Effective customer success teams need to use data to understand what success means to customers. Success may look different to different users and that needs to be taken into account and addressed.
• Put customer success first. While capturing data, have a mental map of how you would use that data and information. This will help understand the customer better, form better personas, and personalise stuff for the customer.
• Segregate customers based on data to ensure high level optimisation based on that. This will ensure that proactive, tech-touch customer onboarding starts, and customers get comfortable with the product soon.
• Data driven customer success will also help identify red flags in customer service. To do that, you need to set up a system that will help address and manage these issues.

Bottom Line

In today’s businesses the core idea is to make customers succeed. The rise in business models like subscriptions have made it more important to keep the customer. This is why a business needs to involve tech closely and build a data-driven culture. A data-driven culture for customer success will impact customer churn, loyalty, revenue, and more. A data-oriented customer success team can enable your company to reach better heights. This can happen with the right people, process, and technology in place.

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