When a company’s mission involves improving client efficiency or productivity, it’s important to first understand what’s slowing customers down. To keep their knowledge of customer needs up to date, workflow companies monday.com, Unqork and Yieldify pay close attention to the specific data.
Unqork’s VP of customer success, Julia Prause, highlights the importance of measuring both objective and subjective data. Understanding how the customer is using the platform is important, but so is the qualitative feedback on customer feelings. Unqork’s ambitious no-code development platform wouldn’t be able to facilitate client innovation without thorough knowledge of how the platform is being used. Once a business has identified the specific data to measure — ROI, health score, and so on — they need to use it to implement change. monday.com’s enterprise team manager of customer success, Olivia Kennis, has some tips.
“While we aim to be as proactive as possible in tailoring strategies, sometimes we have to be reactive,” Kennis told Built In. For monday.com, this means constantly discussing the data both with clients and within the company. These discussions allow the team to predict future customer needs as well as quickly address needs that emerge.
Kennis and Prause, along with Nick Pulvino, Yieldify’s director of client services, elaborated further on the data they measure and how they apply it to best serve their customers in an extended conversation with Built In NYC.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
We track health score (HS), monthly active paying people (MAPP) and retention. MAPP is similar to monthly active users (MAU), however with so many different ways to access monday.com, we wanted to focus specifically on those who are the most invested in our platform. MAPP is often a great indicator of value the customer receives, but doesn’t show the whole picture. As such, our health score is centered around engagement and adoption and focused on a company’s activity within monday.com. For more out-of-the-box metrics, we integrated monday.com into Salesforce, which allowed us to build a customized relationship tracker CRM. Doing this helped us better understand who our biggest advocates are.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
Health score is an awesome indicator for retention and allows us to prioritize clients who may need some extra support. We like to look at HS week over week and analyze trends across clients to help mitigate the risk of them churning. We are also fortunate to use wonderful tools like Looker and Troops AI, which allow us to be proactive as well as reactive to analyze and alert us of any major changes in activity.
We’ve found that proactively addressing engagement data on meetings with clients helps us in the relationship strengthening process.”
Give an example of how you used this data to tailor your reengagement strategy.
While we aim to be as proactive as possible in tailoring strategies, sometimes we have to be reactive and will leverage scaled engagement tactics like mail merge campaigns to drive results. We’ve also found that proactively addressing engagement data on meetings with clients helps us in the relationship strengthening process. We’ve found it best to address it in our executive and quarterly business reviews, success planning calls or regular check ins with our champions.
Even when we’re not sharing our findings with clients, we love to leverage these engagement insights by tailoring our account plans — essentially internal strategy playbooks — to inform the right action items that will move the needle where we have identified room for improvement.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
We are heavily focusing on assessing and monitoring the sentiment of our customers and take into consideration metrics such as their support usage, customer engagement or NPS.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
We look at a combination of data points that are objective — for example, whether the customer is using the platform in a way that’s valuable — but also some that are a bit more subjective sometimes, like the sentiment of the customer as assessed by the CSM that is assigned to an account. Overall, we want to standardize this as much as possible and make sure we’re getting the metrics we need to inform our work.
Overall, we want to standardize as much as possible and make sure we’re getting the metrics we need to inform our work.”
Give an example of how you used this data to tailor your reengagement strategy.
We have implemented a new onboarding process to help us get a sense of leading indicators for customers’ success earlier on and to give us sufficient runway to ensure that our customers are successful.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
Return on investment (ROI) is one of the most important metrics we focus on. While it is not the only metric we look at, it definitely carries more weight, as it is a tangible figure that our clients can take to their teams internally. We also measure how many custom strategies we have built out for our clients that help solve a unique problem on their website not necessarily tied to customer conversion. These types of strategies allow us to be stickier and demonstrate value separate from incremental revenue and ROI.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
Credit usage toward the client’s allotment, incremental revenue or lack thereof, conversion rate uplift and lead generation rate.
ROI carries weight, as it is a tangible figure that our clients can take to their teams internally.”
Give an example of how you used this data to tailor your reengagement strategy.
By identifying underperforming metrics, we can speak with the client to align on goals and specific KPIs that will help get the account back into good standing and improve the likelihood of renewal.
