Retain is Music to the World’s Largest Audio Entertainment Company’s Ears.
Their goal was to build an always-on, data-driven capability to optimize revenue generation through data-backed policies & processes, and enable insights-driven product change management to allow their customer team to spend time on the highest value processes.
The Challenge
To meet the company’s revenue goals, 500+ users across 9 sales and operations teams spend 1 million+ hours per year on customer platforms.
Measuring these hours and how they’re spent is critical in driving high-impact product & business decisions. They wanted to innovate the way their customer-facing teams operated and engaged with customers by moving beyond outdated and incomplete data with internal process measurement methods that were unscalable and unholistic. After spending hundreds of hours gathering data and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars they were still flying blind on how they could reduce time spent on low-quality customer processes and focus on high-return revenue-generating activities to meet their retention and revenue goals.
Results
In addition to optimizing revenue through data-driven policies and processes, Retain helps them save an estimated $3 million and 25,000 hours by informing high-impact product & strategic business decisions.
Retain also helps the company:
- Maximize their return on customer investment for each of their customer spend tiers – so the teams spends time with the highest-value customers resulting in the highest increase in revenue.
- Enable data-driven product decisions to immediately monitor new feature/process improvements – so they know if changes to customer processes create better outcomes.
- Remove operational blockers in workflows – so the team has more time to work on customer-facing and the highest-value processes.
$3M
Cost-Savings
25,000
Hours Saved
Retain helped us optimize revenue and saved us $3 million and 25,000 hours by enabling us to make data-driven product & business decisions and continually improve our customer-facing processes.”
Here’s What They Wanted to Capture.
The What:
Product usage of customer platforms
The time customer success managers (CSMs) are spending on tasks and how frequently they are performing them on different systems, with an eye to improve efficiency
The How:
User Journeys
Understand how CSMs are completing tasks to manage customer onboarding and engagement; identify unexpected or inefficient approaches to make improvements that drive increased revenue
The Who:
User Segmentation
Capture granular, never before available insights on how different roles perform customer work across enterprise systems; leverage insights and the Retain platform to provide segment-specific best practices on what the best workflow is and what systems to use.
The Why:
Automate the Measurement of Where and How Customer Work Gets Done
Priding themselves as a leader in the space, they want to reboot their current internal decision-making process with an insights-driven approach to process and product rollouts that will enable their teams to spend the right amount of time with the right customers to increase revenue and reduce churn. They also want to move from a passive self-reporting data approach to a proactive and effective automated approach to maximize the effectiveness of their customer-facing teams and boost their operational efficiency as they grow.
Process Measurement Methods are Unscalable and Unholistic.
Before Retain, and like many publicly traded enterprises, they brought in consulting firms in the past and sent out time-intensive internal employee surveys to gather data. They estimate total time and cost for each survey amounted to 300+ hours and cost $50,000k to complete. Multiplying that across all planned initiatives added up to thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars – it was time and cost-prohibitive. The resulting data was somewhat helpful but represented a single point in time and was imprecise, unscalable, prone to bias, and quickly outdated. Most importantly, the data didn’t help them gain ongoing insights and feedback on operational or product decisions they rolled out – i.e., did the changes we made yield the expected results and where did the bottleneck shift?
Benefit 1:
Retain Delivered a Detailed Picture of the Return on Customer Investment
Retain provided the platform to enable them to get a clear understanding of revenue lift vs effort across their four main customer spend tiers. Retain delivered a detailed picture of what their cost-to-serve customers was and what the CSM effort yielded in terms of ROI based on revenue generated within each spend tier.
This allowed them to tweak their CSMs run of play to focus on more strategic customers and think about creating more self-serve tools or templated responses to lower-value customers that might be more “squeaky wheels” versus spenders.
Key Insight:
Doubling the time investment with the right customer tier yields 6x revenue growth.
Benefit 2:
Retain Helped Identify and Tackle Operational Blockers
Retain surfaced high-level patterns that highlighted time spent in Salesforce spiking 400% in the week before the holidays. This gave them a head start to rectify what might be causing issues within the customer success team and proactively identify the causes including timeout issues, slow loading reports, and a handful of opps.
Key Insight:
Retain’s ability to surface insights across all of their customer platforms acted as an early warning system to mitigate and optimize operational bottlenecks.
Benefit 3:
Retain Enabled Data-Driven Product Decisions
Retain helped the company visualize workflow inefficiencies including how many times CSMs had to visit a certain page (‘session’) to do their job. Session spikes were a perfect proxy for efficiency since CSMs shouldn’t have to go to the same page 20 times to fulfill a customer order.
They then used this insight to rollout a product update to test the learning curve and time it took to increase efficiency – i.e. did the change lead to a lower frequency of page visits as CSMs completed their workflows after they got used to the process implementation. Along with the data, CSMs gave positive anecdotal feedback about the improved workflow and were elated to ditch what they thought was burdensome low-value work.