The advantage of being a SaaS company is that you can access mountains of data about your customers. Using data science to empower customer success is a guaranteed way to make all sorts of improvements to your company because you can gain an accurate view of how your customers are behaving and what they need from you.
Customer success teams, just like many other teams, want to use data science to improve business outcomes. To utilize data science effectively, you need to know where you are headed and what you want to achieve. This is especially important when it comes to not wasting resources, as data science capabilities are typically expensive.
Of course, you can always guess what your customers want and which tactics will best reduce churn – or you can turn to data science for quantified insights that guide you toward the best strategy.
The Benefits of Data Science for Customer Success
Reduce customer churn
Data science enables you to become more adept at predicting customer churn, a central concern for customer success teams. Not only will you be able to predict, but you will be able to take proactive steps to reduce churn. This results in increased revenue for your business, a key benefit of data science.
A more accurate idea of customer behavior
When you take advantage of data from your CRM and apply data science, you obtain insights into customer behavior. You may see how long customers have been subscribers and the features they engage with most frequently. This can give you valuable knowledge into your product and how to present it to customers.
Improvements in customer health
Data science tells you how to improve customer health, which is important in a recurring revenue business like SaaS. Customer health scores tell you very simply about the customer’s relationship to your business and analyze factors such as usage information and billing status.
More confidence in decisions regarding customers
When you know what customers want and need, you can make more confident decisions regarding your customer success strategy. For example, data science may tell you that there are problems with your onboarding process, and you can decide to take steps to fix it.
An Approach to a Data Science Strategy
Find all sources of customer data
You need to look at all the places where you collect and manage customer data to understand what you already possess. In most SaaS companies, data is abundant; the real challenge is what you do with it when you have it. Data can also be found within your product, which is valuable for data scientists.
Bring your data together in one system
When you bring all your data together, you may find you have excessive amounts, which is why it is useful to combine it into one central system for your data scientists to analyze. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help you make sense of large reams of data and turn them into actionable insights.
Process the data
Analyzing the data is key to making sure it is useful. Looking for patterns and anomalies is one thing your data scientists will do to be able to generate key learning points. Drawing relevant conclusions from the data means you can empower your customer success team to be more effective with customers because they are working with existing knowledge.
Build the connections between customer success and data science
Customer success teams may be sitting on data needed for data science processes. How they conduct their business can also lead to success or failure regarding data science initiatives. It’s important to ensure that customer success and data science teams work towards the same goals to get the most out of the data.
Key Principles for Using Data Science in Customer Success
Turn data into insights
It’s not just about having data and expecting it to benefit your team – you need the tools and processes to turn that data into insights. Churn360 Customer success software offer powerful ways to work with your data without needing data science resources because the software does all the hard work for you.
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School your customer success team in the uses of technology
Customer success teams may work with technology every day – including your product!—but they may lack confidence regarding data and data science tools. Every customer success team should understand the tools needed to manage data to work more effectively with the data science team.
Collect data at every opportunity
Data science tools are only truly powerful when supplied with the data to make them work. You may be missing valuable opportunities to collect data that could help your data science team generate insights. Utilize all your tools to amass the data you need to improve your customer success efforts.
Wrapping Up
When customer success is backed by data science, you can become more empowered in how you help your customers. Deeper insights mean you can offer customers a more meaningful experience by being more aware of their needs. Customer success teams are naturally customer-facing and may not always have access to the data that is in the realm of data science teams.
Tools like Churn360 offer you the power of data science capabilities for customer success teams. With features like insight into customer health and predictors of the likelihood of churn, customer success professionals can easily use their customer data to become more effective in their roles.
