Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Central Desktop has a bold vision; we wanted to “turn email hell into work-together heaven.” But we had a big challenge when it came to working with its own customers. We were periodically blindsided by customers deciding to leave because they hadn’t seen enough value from the service. Churn was particularly troubling given how convenient we make it for customers to unsubscribe or downgrade.. We knew we could stop such customer losses if only they had early visibility into these at-risk accounts. But with thousands of customers, it was impossible to get ahead of the curve and know which customers needed their attention. 

The Solution

First, we mapped out the entire customer's journey from initial inquiry into our company all the way through to when a customer finally transitions to another product. It was painstaking, enlightening, then transformative. We then plotted out every possible moment of truth a customer might have with us. We found over 200 unique touchpoints where we had a chance to delight or disgust our customer. From there, we ran a survey with a random set of customers, asking them to rank each of these from most important to least. Once we did that, we looked our organization internally and discovered before we embarked on a technology expense, we had to right our process and organization - including key customer hand-offs between departments and streamlining the customer's overall experience. Once that transition was completed, we were ready to select the technology which would empower the team, give us the correct visibility and enable a delightful customer experience scaleably.

The results

We wanted a solution that could predict which customers were in poor health so we could then engage with the right customers at the right time with the right type of help to turn them around. After looking at our past customer data, Central Desktop found that one of the best signals of happy, renewing customers was active engagement inside the service. Unfortunately our customer teams at Central Desktop had very limited visibility into ourcustomers’ behavior. We knew we needed to implement a customer success tool that:

• Monitored customer engagement from product usage data

• Provided a predictive health rating that could be easily understood

• Scored customer engagement in order to determine which customers needed attention

We also knew it had to integrate with our existing customer systems including our CRM and ticketing solution. After a careful evaluation fo 7 other tools, we finally chose Totango as our CS platform.

Metrics

After implementing Totango, we was able to identify at-risk accounts in time to be able to make difference. Customer segmentation and predictive analytics has helped Central Desktop reduce our overall churn rate by ten percentage points in just over one year. We can now pinpoint key indicators of a healthy (or unhealthy) account or whether an account will renew (or not). For example, we uncovered five key features that indicate customer “stickiness” and retention. Successful and healthy accounts have high utilization in at least two of these key features, with engagement in two features equating to a forty percent higher retention rate. Because we integrate with our CRM and ticketing solution, we also track other key drivers for a great customer experience including Net Promoter score, relationship with our team, and support ticket history; creating a unified view of a customer's sentiment towards us. This type of data has led us to promote relevant product capabilities to our customers -- accelerating the retention rate by educating our customer base with contextual and actionable content.

Additionally, Central Desktop is now able to uncover critical insights on individual users and their behavior. Armed with this intelligence, we are able to execute highly targeted and personalized campaigns to help specific users become more productive using the company’s collaboration tool.

The Technology

Before implementation: 87% retention rate

After implementation: 93% retention rate

Before implementation - NPS: -10

After implementation - NPS: +2

Disruptive Factor

Once we swallowed our medicine and had full optics into what mattered to our customer, we had the difficult task of defining how we were going to properly respond to our customer's expectations. Defining the right health score so it wasn't simply a vanity metric required honesty, strong internal debate and multiple iterations; all of which taxed the team socially and emotionally. Once we emerged with a stable definition, the technology part and operationalizing was easy. 

Shining Moment

I am most proud of how the team hunkered down, did the hard work, faced necessary realities, stayed on course to chart our course for the future. We took a CRM, our internal tool, our ticketing system, and now Totango to create a full 360 view of the customer's world - focusing always on what the experience looks like from the customer in, not the other way around. It's been game-changing - pure and simple.