Triggers for Non-Telemetry customers?

AshleyGarza123

Hey!

I am on a Digital Customer Success team (100+ accounts per person) and am helping build out the program. I have a couple of questions:

1) For non-telemetry (no product usage) insights, what sort of alert widgets did your company create to understand how well or not well the customer is doing? (e.g. high volume support tickets)

2) How did you use the above alerting for non-telemetry to know when to move a customer from Activation --> Adoption and Adoption --> Expansion?

3) What sort of cadence do you require for a CS person to reach out to each customer (e.g. every 30 days each customer should have some sort of check-in)

4) How to know when a non-telemetry customer is at-risk?

5) What best practices/tools did you use to help build your Digital Program?

Thank you in advance!!!

Ed Powers

Hi @AshleyGarza123--

Do you have other customers where you can see their product usage? What have you learned from that? To what extent is usage predictive of customer behaviors? How do you know?

Whether or not you have usage data, I suggest you follow this process:

1. Ask customers why they leave and why others stay and buy more
2. Quantify the reasons
3. Identify upstream factors and generate hypotheses
4. Collect data and screen variables using factor analysis
5. Develop predictive models, and use them to trigger actions
6. Implement, monitor, and continuously improve

If you learn the reasons why customers do what they do, and then look at your processes, you will ascertain which data you need. Collect it and test it. Usage, support tickets, or anything else you assume is necessary may or may not matter, and correctly done statistical analysis will tell you which are essential and how much they contribute to behavioral predictions.

I hope that helps. Happy to chat more any time.

Ed Powers

AshleyGarza123

Thank you very much. This definitely helps. We have product usage for some customers, some customers cannot connect and give product usage due to internal reasons.

Brian O'Keeffe

https://gaingrowretain.com/discussion/10775/triggers-for-non-telemetry-customers

1. Capture what the goals and objectives are at go-live. Often, the plan will tell you why there is no usage, and sometimes, it is not a bad sign. The plan might be to configure and deploy to A group at X date and then to all users at Z date. Set triggers that fire at those dates. How do you capture that for SMB customers? Use a form they fill out that is integrated, if possible, with your CS tools and customer journey. Deployment ends once you have this completed. 
2. Map out a general timeline for all customers and, using #1 above, adjust the dates as needed. 
3. For SMB, it should be a digital map that includes email (automated) and invitations to training and community forums. Manually follow-up as needed. 
4. New customers who never deploy, active customers who move to a new product or lose a key sponsor, or customers who have a slow decline in usage are all triggers that should generate alerts and play a role in the health score. 
5.  I have used Gainsight and Totango to map out the journey. I strongly advise mapping out one journey for all customers and then iterate. The biggest mistake I have seen is mapping out a digital journey for some customers and nothing for others. (We will get to it later; you never will!) That leaves your digital program as separate, as a rival to "real" CS, and it will be seen as less than. 

Hope this helps!