“If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.”

What do executives mean when they use this phrase? They know that if their company stays as they are, eventually they’d get worse compared to their competitors.  Their competitors’ success forces them into changing how they perform, and vice versa. Hence, their company has to keep getting better, even if it isn’t sick.

Take a look at Salesforce.com in 2004. They had 20,000 customers of their cloud-based CRM software, up from about 6,000 a few years earlier. They were rapidly on their way to reaching unicorn status of a $1B market cap. But they were losing 8% of their subscribers each month. Yikes! That’s a big problem when a recurring revenue business depends on growing revenue from its customer base. Salesforce responded by changing from
reactively to proactively managing its existing customer relationships. They eventually succeeded in reducing customer churn to 1% per month and the loss of customers to their competitors. Their competitors had to follow suit to keep up. Now, proactive customer success management is one of the hottest movements in business today.

What does this mean for your Customer Success?
All of your customers need to keep improving, too, or they’ll fall behind. And your customers know this. Consequently, they need to know how they’re doing and where they can improve versus others like them. These comparative insights motivate improvement actions inside their companies, which leads to achieving their desired business outcomes — including staying competitive.

If your company offers cloud-based, recurring revenue solutions such as a SaaS subscription, then you have data that’s a byproduct of your customer relationships and their usage of your solutions. As your customers are buying the same solutions for similar business reasons, this data contains a rich source of comparative insights for each customer – insights they can’t get anywhere else.

Your customers can use these unique insights to improve. That’s important to you, too. If they’re not improving, then their outcomes, health and loyalty won’t improve, and you won’t achieve the retention and upselling rates that your company needs to grow.

Comparative insights help Customer Success Managers do their job better.
Today, your CSMs likely use customer data to gain a full picture of an account and to evaluate a customer’s likelihood for renewing, buying more or advocating your solution. This customer insight serves your company well, whereas comparative insights serve your customers well. With unique comparative insights, CSMs can deliver more value to each customer in each interaction. They’ll get a better response to their proactive outreaches, have more strategic conversations with key stakeholders during quarterly business reviews and, most importantly, provoke customer actions to improve their behaviors with your solutions.

Generating comparative insights
The process of identifying areas where one can improve by comparing to others is called benchmarking. With your own data, your CSMs can use benchmarking, too. You can create scorecards with a spreadsheet or CSM software product to rank customers and do simple performance comparisons on individual metrics. If you have relevant benchmarks or targets, CSMs can draw additional insights. But the really noteworthy, action-provoking insights are much harder to find. You’ll need data analysts or data scientists who can perform deep, comparative analysis involving complex correlations, comparisons and clustering across multiple dimensions. Unfortunately, they’re in short supply and CSMs have to wait in line to get what they need.

As a result, CSMs settle for rankings and benchmarks without the deeper analysis, which has limited value. It’s like they have Consumer Reports’ published rankings and performance ratings of cars but without the written analysis for each.

An easy, scalable way to get comparative insights
I’m quite excited that, just last week, my company OnlyBoth announced a new customer analytics solution that can help CSMs take full advantage of the unique insights that exist in their company’s data. OnlyBoth’s Customer Benchmarking Engine uses artificial intelligence to completely automate the searching, analysis and reporting of comparative insights in data. CSMs can simply enter a customer name and get numerous comparative insights in seconds. The software performs a massive, sophisticated data analysis that would take many data scientists many months to do.

Here’s an example of a deep, comparative insight the engine found in the data we gave it. This insight is written up by the software using its natural language generation technology.

Rhynyx is amongst a group of 55 customers who are using a vendor’s HR software suite more actively than their other customers. However, Rhynyx is not keeping pace with their use of the recruiting module, a core sticky function of the vendor’s HR suite. A CSM can use this insight to proactively engage Rhynyx to examine the root causes and take action so they can achieve similar outcomes to those 55 peer customers.

You can see more examples and learn about our software here.

As someone who sits at the intersection of customer success leadership and benchmarking innovation, I hope to share more about this important but under-discussed topic in future posts. If you have experiences and lessons learned with using benchmarking and comparative insights for Customer Success, I’d love to hear from you.

Jim Berardone