Business Intelligence for Customer Success

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, keeping a strong customer relationship will always be the bread and butter of your business. Without consumers or companies to invest in your product or service, you’re - for a lack of a better term - doomed.

Don’t worry, it’s not our style to let you sink and swim. In fact, we’ve got the ultimate lifeboat just for you! When it comes to customer retention and customer service, the best way to instill a strong recurrence of clients is to invest in a business intelligence tool.

Business intelligence is a powerful platform that allows users to forecast future reports and analysis based on historical data. While that’s a very generalized definition, when it comes to a specific job role, a BI tool has customizable capabilities that target precise departments.

For the customer success team, this is crucial for keeping up appearances and making sure that all accounts managers and clients are on the same page.

Is the customer always right?

It’s a saying as old as time, which has unfortunately, over time, become distorted. Currently, many refer to this phrase as giving into a customer’s demands, whether they’re good or bad. What it actually refers to is going the extra mile for a customer and taking the time to really listen to their needs, and subsequently providing them with what they want and need.

In order to avoid yearly customer churn, the objective for a customer success team is to have certain KPIs in place: renewal rates, retention, control escalation, upsells - the list can get long, as each client is different.

While an ERP system works wonders for documenting the correct data, without a BI platform, these processes are typically done manually. Without sounding like a broken record, it can cause copious amounts of errors. While certain errors can be forgiven, more often than not, when an error causes an issue with a client, it can lead to the end of that partnership.

Therefore, the question is: how can you make sure the customer is always right? Well, business intelligence for customer success is designed to automate processes that would normally be done manually in order to avoid the delay of information as well as elevate the frustration of managers who lack the appropriate data to serve clients.

Avoid customer churn at all costs

When it comes to customers, especially within the professional services industry where customers are more valuable than gold, avoiding customer churn is at the core of the business. What would the business be without clients?

Good customer relations lead to the type of partnership where a client wants (and often goes out of their way) to recommend your company’s service.

A business intelligence platform will be able to showcase data regarding customer churn. If you take a specific year, you can analyze how much or how little customer churn your company had. If there are a lot of lost customers, you can pinpoint the issue and strategize the best solution to improve satisfaction.

Should it be the other way around and you are very successful with your customers, leading to a constant flow of loyal recurring clients as well as new clients, then you can take the same approach, but instead of finding a solution, find a way that grows the client base even more.

You have what the customer wants

At this point, you most likely have a solid customer base and you can safely say that you have what their business needs and wants. Your sales team has done the excellent work of nurturing the prospect into a client. Now it’s up to you to keep them. They have the product they’ve been searching for, but now it’s up to your team to keep them happy.

Customer success management entails creating monthly or quarterly business reviews. These are vital reports that bring into light the accounts that bring the greatest value, how satisfied each client is, clients that want upgrades, the monetary value of a client’s investment with the company, and their overall profile.

Perhaps there is a company that started as a small-sized business, but has now grown to a medium-sized business. With this growth, their needs have changed drastically and they require a certain level of personalization with their ERP system.

Business intelligence has the capability to recognize this client and provide you with the necessary data that will enable you to go to them with new ideas on how to plan their growth, before they become agitated with their current system.

Mixing ERP with BI

A great cocktail in business often includes an ERP system partnered with a business intelligence platform. Two powerful tools that coincide with each other to create the ultimate reporting product.

Each on their own are still dynamic and have incredible influence over your business processes. Together, they’re unstoppable. For customer relationships, this is a great mix as you can market, sell, and keep up to date with your customers in an ERP. While with BI you can take all those reports (no matter the volume) and insert them into a data warehouse where they’ll be accessible on a customizable dashboard.