Automation and Scaling: Putting the C360 to Work

Previously: When the Magic Happens: A Customer360 Table and Dashboards

TLDR: Use the C360 table to automate workflow. Build triggers based on customer behaviors and create content to proactively engage with customers, and remove manual monitoring work.

For the Long Form Post:

In my previous post, I shared the transformative impact from our C360 table and how it changed how we were running Customer Success. In this post, I’ll continue to dive into how this has opened up a world of automation and scaling that wouldn’t be possible without it.

The age-old question for startups is when do you need to hire more people. We are in a growth stage and adding new customers across tiers every day. Our CSMs are handling onboarding, Profiles engagements, QBRs/Strategy sessions, and renewals, while TAMs are doing onboarding for Starter/Growth accounts, answering technical questions, and managing technical questions live on calls.

Everyone is busy and context switching constantly. We’ve removed a lot of the “monitoring” workload in identifying which accounts need some extra attention to get in a better place, but we haven’t figured out how to proactively do that work.

We spent some time with a subset of the team and came up with a few touchpoints in the customer lifecycle that we think could be automated, especially for our Starter and Growth accounts.

We wanted to find ways we could still provide materials and support to customers based on behavioral signals. There are are a few areas we wanted to try and automate:

Internal Reporting: We have internal slack channels for all accounts that have our C-level, account team, and other Product or Engineering folks. We wanted reporting that could go directly into the channel and provide a holistic view of what the customer is doing, and serve as a quick reference for the CS team who may need to ping the customer.

Low Engagement: Based on experience, we know that low engagement with us tends to be a red flag. Some customers want us just “working in the background”, which is great, but there’s no real way to track “hey, this customer is cool and wants us to leave them alone”.

Sometimes the customer has forgotten about implementation, or has an issue and doesn’t realize we can help them solve it. We already have a metric for this, but we want to trigger an automatic outreach message to the customer in Slack if they’ve had 0 Gong calls, 0 tickets, and 0 unique logins in the last 30 days.

To test this, we created an internal bot in a slack channel that flags customers that fit this criteria and tags the CSM/TAM. The CSM/TAM can quickly chat about the account and figure out the best way to reach out to the specific customer to check in. Since the first draft of this post, we’ve since launched an external view of this directly going into customer Slack channels.

Renewal Notifications: Our CSMs spend a significant amount of time reaching out to customers to notify them of an upcoming renewal. We are setting up an internal notification to ping a CSM directly 120 days out from a renewal to prompt them to reach out. Eventually, we’d like these notifications to automatically go directly into a Slack channel and email to the customer.

Transformation (or other feature) Usage: Transformations tends to be an incredibly helpful and sticky feature that customers love. The challenge is that it has extremely broad applications and can be difficult to help customers understand the flexibility it can offer.

For customers not using transformations, we want to start proactively pushing content with use cases, how-to guides, and even quick Loom videos that showcase how transformations can be set up and used for their business. The goal is for it to pique curiosity and potentially uncover challenges for a customer.

Customer Turnover or New Users: People on our account team will leave the company, or we get a new joiner who needs to get up to speed on what has happened with RudderStack.

We’re building some automation triggered by a new user being added to a workspace — we want to send a welcome message in Slack along with RudderStack 101 content, as well as videos on how to get familiar with the current implementation. The goal is to help facilitate knowledge transfer across the client team, and make sure we’re quickly aware of any champion change.

Again, we can trigger this proactive workflow based on signals we are capturing in our C360 table. In the short term, we’ll feed this trigger into the internal slack channel, and then have CSMs/TAMs manually reach out. Eventually we’ll transition this all into the external shared slack channel.

Low Contract Utilization: As previously mentioned, our commercial model is based on an annual contract, typically with a monthly data or event volume. Contract utilization percentage is a big indicator for us on whether or not a customer will churn, contract, renew, or expand.

For customers below a certain threshold, we want to encourage them to try and adopt more. In these instances, we are building out content in collaboration with out marketing team to try and send use cases, educational material, and other data points to get them re-engaged with our product. It’s similar to account-based marketing, but it’s over Slack and targeted on product usage.

We will have CSMs and TAMs reach out in tandem, but the hope is that proactively sharing content can help customers see value.

Onboarding: As we grow, we’re going to have to figure out a lower-touch model for our Starter and Growth tier customers. We will still offer the slack support for those customers, but instead of Zoom calls during onboarding, we are aiming to develop self-guided assets that can help customers work through onboarding.

We now have the monitoring tools in place that we will be able to intervene in any customer not making progress, but we’ll also be able to save time for customers that don’t really need that level of support to get going.

This content will be automatically sent directly into slack channels on a defined timeline based on the contract signed date from Salesforce.

Summary

Automation is going to be critical for us to scale. We can’t just throw more and more bodies at the problem as we grow. We aren’t wanting to remove support, but we want to figure out how to more effectively spend our time.

Customers also don’t really want to be bogged down with additional meetings if they don’t need it. We believe we have found a good way to proactively send materials while having enough of a monitoring system and safety net in place that we can identify accounts going sideways early and make sure they get back on track.

This is a future state, but it’s been incredibly exciting for our team to get creative in thinking about how we can continue to deliver the same excellent customer experience while making sure our team doesn’t have to grow linearly with our customer count.

Next Up: CS Best Practices: Calculating GDR with a Rolling Forecast