Presented by Totango
How does a company succeed even as inflation and interest rates soar and the stock market struggles? In this digital-first era, recurring revenue and customer retention reign supreme. In fact, during periods of economic instability, it may be the only growth channel on which you can depend. You must protect your customer base by delivering value at every stage of their journeys, even as budgets get tighter.
“Customers today want everything better, faster, easier and cheaper,” explains industry expert and author Geoffrey Moore. “They’ll put you under the microscope to make sure you’re delivering and if they see no value, they’re not going to re-up.”
The annuity business model is more predictable than the lumpy sales model companies used to rely on — but only if you keep your customer base loyal. That’s why it’s critical your company reorients the sales funnel to focus on customer outcomes. Companies need to invest in technology that can help them reorient their teams toward customer success, and turn their customer journey into the company’s most lucrative product.
Embrace a value-driven model
How do you invert the pipeline so that customer value is the focus, not an afterthought?
The amount of change required to embrace this value-driven model can seem daunting. You may not know where to start or how to take control. On top of that, unwieldy monolith CS platformsone-trick ponies, and piecemeal CS solutions only create chaos.
It’s critical to find a solution that unifies your teams around targeted engagements, customer health data and reporting and powerful automation, like Totango’s Composable Customer Success Platform.
Deliver value on day 1
Your customers can only be your life raft if they remain engaged — so now is not the time to spend mountains of cash and countless hours preparing for a big bang installation that takes nine months to launch, let alone rely on outdated excel spreadsheets and awkwardly retrofitted CRMs.
“When your customer success platform requires heavy implementation, significant system admin intervention, or is hard to adjust, your teams become stuck in a reactive state — mired in inconsistencies, redundancies, gaps and lethargy,” says Dennis Reardon, chief revenue officer of Totango. “That adds up to poor retention, lack of expansion, higher churn rates, a burned-out team and declining NRR.”-Totango’s Composable Customer Success Platform invites you to dive into customer success today, see immediate results, and then scale as you grow. You can empower your teams to mix, match and build a foundation for success in mere seconds via Totango’s Customer Journey Marketplace, which includes customizable, best-practice templates (or apps) called SuccessBLOCs.
Your business is unique, and the same can be said for each of your customers. That’s why Totango not only offers best-practice templates, but also enables you to continuously personalize and iterate upon SuccessBLOCs to bring value to every customer — without having to hire expensive professionals to do the work for you.
“Thanks to the platform’s architecture, it’s easy to tweak the SuccessBLOCs to fit our business,” says Dione Hedgpeth, chief customer officer at Sumo Logic. “Totango has also implemented features for us that we believe are good for the industry at large. That type of customer attention is amazing.”
The power of automation
Your customer success solution must also be scalable so you can bring value to accounts of every size and importance. That’s where Totango’s powerful automation comes in. Automations keeps an eye on all your customers, triggering automatic actions or prompts for your team when needed, so that they’re always covered. It drives engagement that’s proactive and personalized to create a more consistent customer experience, and ultimately increases renewals and reduces costs.
“With Totango, we’re managing over 13,000 customers on a global scale in seven different languages with only seven customer success managers,” says Carlos Quezada, head of CS and SaaS operations at Aruba. “Totango’s automation helps us understand what the customer’s current state is and how to engage at the right time; and the Multidimensional Customer Health View allows us to get more granular as we segment our customers, which helps us be more effective and repeatable.”
With Totango’s Composable Customer Success Platform, your teams won’t waste their time scrambling to save relationships. Armed with key health metrics and powerful automation, they can instead proactively iterate on existing processes or brainstorm around new ones to bring even better value to customers — not to mention easily recognize exposure to market downturns and seize opportunities for expansion.
Know your customers — today
You can’t know what tomorrow will bring, but you can know your customer base. In fact, with a Totango Community Edition, you can get started for free identifying new ways to bring customers more value right now by activating the Invest in CS SuccessBLOC bundle, which includes:
Monitor Customer Health: Analyze risk exposure in your customer base and view real-time health.
Detect Risk: Identify key areas of risk and take action to protect business profitability.
Customer Marketing: Open communication with customers so that you can remind them why you are relevant for their business and drive efficient growth.
Wherever your organization is in making the shift to a value-driven model, these three SuccessBlocs can empower you to immediately strengthen your organization’s understanding and interactions with your customer base so they remain loyal and engaged — no matter what’s going on in the world!
Compose customer journeys together
Totango’s Customer Experience Canvas unites all your teams on an agile, shared visual workspace so they can design, build, run and measure your entire customer journey lifecycle seamlessly, together.
Here’s a look at how more Totango clients are using the Composable Customer Success Platform to dramatically improve team functioning, drive success for their customers and deliver real-world ROI.
For Sumo Logic, Totango’s Composable Customer Success Platform is a one-stop-shop for its customer success managers, as well as other key teams. Hedgepeth credits the work done on the platform for the company’s 8% YoY logo retention improvement.
With a single platform that allows the company to load all activities and metrics, SumoLogic has been able to import key metrics into Salesforce for its sales team and integrate Asana for its professional services team, according to Hedgpeth. It’s also been a wonderful way to onboard managers quickly and make them look more competent in front of customers, Hedgpeth adds.
“We’re a high-growth company, and Totango helped us transition successfully from ‘everyone kinda does things their own way’ to a place where all the best practices were kept,” Hedgpeth says. “It integrates a more customer-facing project management, and the key milestones are all now automatically integrated in Totango. Thank goodness!”
Waystar turned to Totango’s platform to manage risk by streamlining data, unifying its team and gaining visibility into all its client success metrics.
“I would recommend Totango to any organization — whether they’re at the early stages of building a client success team or if they’re thinking about how to take their customer success a step further,” says Madhavi Bezwada, vice president of client success at Waystar. “We’ve identified YOY improvements with Totango — and that means greater client satisfaction, growth and retention, as well as team member satisfaction.”
Want to learn how the Composable Customer Success Platform can deliver strong growth for your company in any economy? Check out this webinar along with signing up for free and start creating your own customer journey with Totango today. Then, as you iterate, learn, and see immediate results, you can easily scale and grow to ensure your customer’s success remains your success.
Jamie Bertasi is President and Chief Operations Officer at Totango.
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