Visibility is Vital: Real-time Usage Insights Facilitate Meaningful Engagements
Cision is a leading global provider of earned media software and services to public relations and marketing communication professionals. CIsion’s software allows users to identify key influencers, craft and distribute strategic content, and measure meaningful impact. Cision has over 4,800 employees with offices in 24 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA and APAC.
“Having access to real-time usage data brings real clarity to our conversations with customers. The visibility is the difference between a small, dirty portal and expansive, floor-to-ceiling pane-glass windows!”
Kurt Wyckoff, Senior Director of Client Development | Cision
The Challenge
For most subscription businesses, a customer's success is highly correlated with their use of the business’ product or service.
But for many Customer Success (CS) teams, insights to their customer’s usage data is elusive. Some fly blind with no data at all, while others get periodical updates that stale quickly.
While Cision boasts a large, proactive account management group, the team struggled to understand how their customers use their products. Monthly summaries of basic account usage were available, but account managers needed to manually audit each account for the most up-to-date information. Too often, account managers were having customer conversations without having enough insights into how the customer was (or was not!) engaged with their offerings.
The Process
Productive CS teams insist on real-time usage insights, as they see its link to a productive and successful customer relationship.
Knowing when important events happen, as they happen, empowers CSMs to advance desirable usage patterns, fend off potential problems or frustrations, and have meaningful engagements.
To become more proactive, Cision’s account management team developed a list of the critical data for their reps, including:
- Positive events, such as when a customer used a sticky feature for the first time and when a customer had noteworthy success with one of their campaigns
- Negative events, such as when a customer had problems or errors with the service
- Neutral events, such as reports shared or search terms refreshed
The Impact
The customer insights data came together to create a clear picture of the customer’s usage over time.
The team is now better informed during normal customer engagements and has real-time alerts that gives them a heads-up when critical milestones happen.
How You Can Start
- Positive events to open up discussions about ROI and additional features
- Negative events to drive discussions on best practices, avoid customer frustrations and head off churn
- Neutral events to give the CSM a clear understanding of engagement over time