customer usage data trending & customer health - looking for advice

@Zohar Gillai, I suggest you do some basic statistical analysis before you spend a lot of time, money and effort integrating data sources. Factor analysis is often sufficient to screen which data are useful for your health dashboard and which are not. Then you can more systematically collect only the data you need. You can later refine your health dashboards using regression or more advanced predictive analytics to improve accuracy. 

Assumptions that usage, login frequency, trouble tickets, email response rates, or any number of other factors (x1, x2, x3, ...xn) impact customer behaviors (y) are mathematically testable hypotheses. I teach a course on how use statistical tools in Customer Success that describes how to do it by just using Excel. This might be of interest to you. I'm also happy to help you analyze what you have now so you can construct better health indicators much faster. If that's of interest, email me at ed@se-partners.com and we can set up a call to talk about it.

Hi Zohar,

I'm curious about your insistence on a time-series database for this use case. You should be able to handle this fine with a SQL-based data warehouse (e.g. Amazon Redshift). While Pendo will need to collect and present very granular time-series metrics, for your use case, summarized monthly or weekly customer data points are sufficient.  

Does that help?

-Dan

@here - this is an awesome thread and an adventure that we are actively navigating today. Would love to get some insight from the group on the sync between a CS platform/tool and SFDC.

Thanks,
Todd

• Product data (from their tenant)
• Salesforce data
• Community data
• Training & Education data

This will be a start but starting via Excel pulls and PowerBI until we can find the right mechanisms to automate over time.

That is exactly what we did. Ive found that starting with down and dirty and then improving the process and tools thru gen 1, gen 2, etc is a practical way to develop a thorough understanding of data sources, its usefulness, its state, and how to best analyze, report, and act on it.

Hey @Zohar Gillai - we're working on pulling together a PowerBI dashboard with several data sources that map back to a customer.

Some of the data files we'll be using...

• Product data (from their tenant)
• Salesforce data
• Community data
• Training & Education data

This will be a start but starting via Excel pulls and PowerBI until we can find the right mechanisms to automate over time.

Hi Zohar,

Great question and a very worthy endeavor!  We also collect our customer usage data and specifically tie it into our ChurnZero instance where we can collect and analyze that data (and make it actionable). In particular, when we are tracking and trying to proactively determine our customer's health, we have a few specific usage indicators we look for to calculate our health score. After all, we are firm believers that if a customer is not engaging with our platform, that is a massive risk.

Full disclosure, I work for the company whose software I use for this (ChurnZero), but the only reason I even know about Customer Success software tools is because about three years ago I was managing a small customer success team and we needed something to help our own team with our renewal process, determining the health of our clients, and we needed somewhere to house all of the data streams we were collecting so we could make sense of them. After some due diligence, ChurnZero was selected as the software of choice, and after a bit of a whirlwind, I left a year later to join the team here. 

Depending on your data streams, role, and the needs of your CS org, it might be time to start considering a dedicated CS tool - especially one that integrates with Pendo so you can reach all of that rich data. I could not be happier that we have one, as it allows me to track our health scores, usage data, CRM data, engagement (emails and logged tasks, etc), in one place where all of the data can be actionable.

Or - are you specifically asking more for business intelligence type tools for the product team to have insight into usage trends?

Thanks - Happy to dig in anywhere if you'd like more information!
Bri

Hey Zohar - I would recommend speaking to @Brian LaFaille .  He and I had a very similar conversation last week about pulling data from many systems under one hood.