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Quala CMO, Mike Redd, on Maximizing Customer Health and Retention through Customer Success Platform Technology

The launch of the next generation of customer success platforms is taking place right now. Mike Redd, Chief Marketing Officer of Quala, outlines the evolution of these platforms and shows how frontline intelligence provides a clearer insight into customers than has previously been possible.

How long has it been since organizations have used customer success platforms to improve their operations?
Gainsight was the first major player to emerge in the market for customer success solutions. They discovered that a company’s salesforce was a valuable source of customer information that was underutilized. Until the introduction of Gainsight, no solution allowed customer success teams to manage all of the data collected from their customers.

Several next-generation customer success platforms have entered the market since that time. The features offered by different customer success systems are becoming increasingly similar. You have access to all of your customer information in one spot. The team is tasked with completing the work prompted by the data. You have visibility into your clients, and your team understands how to provide better service to them.

What businesses are using customer success platforms?

Platforms for customer success were first introduced by software as a service ( SaaS) companies. Customers of SaaS companies design products that they can connect to and utilize through the internet. Google Apps, Dropbox, DocuSign, MailChimp, and Slack are just a few examples of popular cloud-based services. Customer feedback is actively monitored by SaaS organizations since they supply software that is purchased on a “pay as you go” basis, rather than a subscription basis.

Early-stage SaaS enterprises rely on actual customer interactions to gain an understanding of their customers’ requirements. As SaaS organizations increase in size, the amount of interaction with customers gets overwhelming, and business leaders find themselves unable to properly comprehend their customers’ needs. This divergence results in lost revenue, missed customer opportunities, fewer upsells, and the failure to prioritize key roadmap initiatives on an ongoing basis.

Customer success platforms provide what kind of insight into the habits of its customers?
A customer success platform enables SaaS leaders to tap into a data source that is being generated daily. Customers and prospects are observed by frontline workers, and this knowledge is transformed into easy and actionable information for the company. Businesses become significantly more customer-centric as a result of collecting this data. Insights gained from the information are used to create approaches to engage customers and inform the broader strategy of the company.

What insight into customer habits do customer success platforms offer?

A customer success platform, which allows organizations to observe and interact with their consumers, provides insights into the following areas:

What the product is being used for by customers
What the average customer is paying
Interactions with customers in the recent past
Customer success platforms can automatically trigger workflows based on the information collected from customers. Customers who are making use of product capabilities may be ready for an upsell.

In the absence of a customer success platform, a company would be forced to mine data from mountains of reports and spreadsheets to acquire the same degree of input from customers. Taking the appropriate action at the appropriate moment would necessitate continuous monitoring.

How are customer success platforms evolving today?

Quala has been working actively toward the development of the next phase in the evolution of customer success platforms for quite some time. We have evolved into a customer success platform that is powered by frontline intelligence. We will no longer be a customer success platform at some time in the future. We will serve as a first-responder intelligence platform.

At that point, you may have a customer success platform in place, such as Gainsight, and use Quala in conjunction with it. Gainsight would manage your workflows and provide you with a 360-degree view of your clients in a single location. Quala would be the learning engine that would feedback to you in hard data what you were hearing from your consumers.

What sets Quala apart from other customer success platforms?

Quala believes there is a gap in the market for customer success platforms. Every day, customer success teams receive feedback from customers and look over comments from those customers. There is currently no system in place to collect the information that this frontline personnel is gathering. There is currently no method to get information about what customers are saying. It is our goal to provide statistics to support what frontline teams are hearing up to and even the SaaS executive suite.

We internally introduced the prototype of our customer success platform, which is powered by frontline information, and put it through its paces on our customers. During the Thanksgiving holiday, we introduced this initiative to our consumers.

It was beneficial to our organization to do internal testing of this new platform because it helped us pick which software to integrate with the program—Zendesk or Slack. Following the reports from our customer success team, we were well on our way to implementing Zendesk; nevertheless, we observed a few requests for Slack at the last minute. Quala was utilized to do a comprehensive examination of all of our consumer data. As it turned out, the data revealed that we had a few vocal clients who requested Zendesk, but who were far more interested in Slack. It also revealed that our most valuable clients were the ones that requested Slack. Quala guided our December roadmap, which included a shift in emphasis to Slack integration.

Quala enables your company to search through all of the qualitative data contained in notes and emails in one place. You can track the evolution of keywords or phrases over time. Additionally, you can view the information about a certain consumer. This will demonstrate to you how valuable each customer’s opinion on a certain topic is to your company’s bottom line.

Customer health can be better understood through qualitative data than through quantitative data, which is currently employed by customer success platforms to determine customer health. Several platforms, for example, assess customer health by looking at how involved customers are in utilizing the product in question. What happens if someone uses your product frequently yet despises it? Although the amount of product usage is vital to know, other indications from the client that are difficult to record are as important to know. In traditional customer success platforms, a qualitative observation such as a phone conversation expressing that a client is dissatisfied does not result in a change to their health score. We’re stepping in to fill the void.

What is the best way to make sense of the things that people pick up on in conversations? What steps do you take to make that knowledge useful to your company? That is the underlying notion of our company name, Quala. We collect qualitative information and turn it into something valuable.