Providing Deeper Visibility and Prediction
What is Hook solving?
B2B SaaS is a constantly expanding industry, and the revenue potential is huge as the subscription economy grows. But there’s a challenge. With so much choice, businesses can easily leave one software provider for another without warning. SaaS companies make most of their revenue from their existing customer base and not incoming sales, so keeping customers engaged and renewing is key to survival.
Hook’s mission is to equip Customer Success teams with the data they need to accurately and automatically predict NRR, upsell and churn, at scale. We’re passionate about providing this in the most accessible and understandable way.
Every feature that we design and introduce is the result of detailed consultation with CS leaders and managers, as well as the extensive CS experience of the Hook team. We constantly improve our product with the feedback from our users.
We’re proud to present a few of the great features the team has been working on recently.
Automatic Engagement Scores
How engaged are your users? How likely are they to renew?
These two questions are at the heart of Customer Success, and yet they can be hard for CSMs to answer accurately. Gathering the engagement data needed can be a challenging task for SaaS companies, and often it is displayed in an inaccessible way.
On top of that, usually a CSM must manually input the data points needed to answer the key question ‘will your account renew or churn?’ This is a time-consuming process, and often forces CSMs to rely on imperfect information to validate their gut feel.
Hook’s answer is to provide a data-driven Automatic Engagement Score for every customer. By pulling key product data and presenting it in a usable way, you can see in seconds whether a customer is on track to renew without using huge data teams.
Our first release of this score looks at active user data, license consumption, feature usage and more to automatically generate an engagement score for every customer. It enables your teams to focus on the accounts that matter and have immediate visibility into when engagement drops.
Customer Focus
How do you keep track of individual customers?
A lot of CS teams make do with technology that is not designed for them. Often this means using platforms that are geared toward sales teams, who generally don’t need an aggregated view of their work. A classic CS obstacle is the “tab problem” — all your customer data, meeting info, notes, targets, health scores and goals are all fragmented and split across different tools within an organisation. This can make it tricky to get the full picture about the current status of individual customers.
Hook’s Customer Focus presents insights in the clearest way possible. A single page view shows all the information you might need: ARR, renewal date, number of users and licences, engagement level, contact details, last meeting date, and more. We’ve made it simple to filter and sort this information to get the data you need, and you can quickly export reports for internal and external meetings.
User Insights
While customer focus is important, we don’t stop there. Do you have easy access to information about individual users of your product?
User Insights provides a detailed view of every one of your users, a resource that we know is valued by CS teams. Hook tracks the interactions that each user has with your product and automatically categorise key personas across every customer.
The aim of the feature is to empower CSMs to know exactly who to focus on. You can keep track of how everyone is doing and concentrate on the people who really need support.
One thing CSMs love about this feature is it gives a great view of engagement right down to individual users, marking out the people who are active and those who aren’t interacting with your product. With one glance at User Insights, CSMs can identify and target users who are inactive and highlight and reward power users.
Effortless Meeting Tracking
Another useful element here is it tells you when a user last had a meeting with someone in your CS team. This helps CSMs keep on top of touchpoints and meetings without searching through calendars and diaries to try and remember the last time they caught up with a user.
We’re proud of the fact that CSMs don’t need to constantly update recent meeting activity. One big ask from CS teams is to reduce the amount of time they have to spend manually inputting data, which can be time consuming and inaccurate. Our Zoom integration is a great example of how we’re responding — CSM meetings with users are automatically logged in Hook, taking note of not just the meeting but also who was present. It makes it very easy to keep track of when you last interacted with a user or a customer, which allows you to work more efficiently.
Very soon we’re intending to add this data to our automatic engagement scores to validate the impact of meetings on renewal rates and product usage — watch this space!
So what’s next?
We’re always working on new and exciting features based closely on feedback from CS teams and from our users. Some of the new developments we’re really excited to release are:
- Be proactive with alerts: Hook cuts through the noise and draws your attention to key developments that are likely to have a revenue impact. Know when your key users disengage, or when customers miss an onboarding goal in your product and take action.
- Stay organised with notes: Quickly and easily make notes relating to accounts and users in Hook to enable you to keep track of key info you need to remember and share these with your team.
- Manage your customers’ journey: By tracking your customers’ lifecycle in Hook you can keep track of where each customer is in their journey with you and give them the right support at the right moment.
- Know what actions to take: we’re going deeper with our engagement scores by benchmarking them against renewal rates and automatically testing the likely outcomes at renewal. By testing every metric which is actionable, we’re planning to provide a realtime view of what actions CSMs should take in an individual account — down to individual users they should speak to.
Keep up to date on Hook’s latest developments and blogposts by following Hook on Medium.
