Customer success experts are likely familiar with the six business challenges plaguing the industry: unexpected churn, inability to scale, missed expansion opportunities, a disconnected customer experience, and poor product adoption. The sixth? Lack of customer visibility. For an in-depth understanding of each of these business challenges, don’t miss the remaining webinars in our GameChangers Playbook series.
Today, we find out how ADP, a stalwart of the online payroll and HR industry, accepted the visibility challenge, and won. ADP’s transformation process was the topic of a Gainsight webinar featuring Edgar Ramirez Vilchez, ADP’s director of customer success operations, and Mike Maday, Gainsight’s regional director of client outcomes. The CS leaders discussed how ADP, in partnership with Gainsight, has unified customer data across the company, creating a single source of truth to precisely measure its customers’ status and health. ADP has saved time and money using custom dashboards and workflows and by pivoting, when needed, in response to feedback and surveys. In short, ADP has changed its customer success game.
Opaqueness everywhere (almost)
Mike kicked off the webinar by sharing some startling statistics: According to research from IDC, four out of five organizations rely on data across multiple organizational processes. Yet workers waste 44% of their time each week trying to solve disjointed collaboration processes and yawning information gaps. More grim news: A typical organization that isn’t using a CS solution rates its visibility level as a disappointing 2 out of 5.
In other words, many companies (and countless employees) feel like they have the visibility of mud.
ADP embraces four strategic steps to visibility
To help ADP turn this opaqueness into transparency, Edgar and the Customer Success Operations team turned to Gainsight. The partnership helped ADP to rethink its approach to visibility. They set the following goals:
- Create a single source of truth. Unifying and consolidating multiple disparate data systems would put an end to frustrating, inefficient data-hunting that Edgar likens to “going out into the wilderness.”
- Structure customer data to accurately represent client relationships. Customers all have different products, team types and sizes, and levels of adoption. While such variables make the quest for unified insights complicated, they also make it even more essential.
- Precisely measure customer health with sophisticated health scorecards. A multifactorial approach to scorecards, along with frequent updates and accuracy checks, means accuracy is table stakes.
- Take action on trends and observations at scale. The point of having consolidated insights and data? Being able to take smart steps and strategic action fast, at scale. Says Edgar, “Data is not just data. You need to know what’s actually valuable.”
Once these goals were established, the client success team sought to understand what was most important to each stakeholder, be it data and KPIs or unified communication processes across the company. Then the team assessed which tools they’d need to gain 360-degrees of visibility across the organization about both customers and products. The answer was a one-stop-shop solution: Gainsight’s NXT platform.
Here are some of the Gainsight features that Edgar credits with ADP’s visibility transformation.
Client data? Product data? Both!
Delineating between product and client data is critical. Edgar explains that at ADP, a lot of relationship management happens at the product level. A single, consolidated view of client and product data may not tell the full story.
If a health scorecard drops due to a product issue, for example, CSMs need that information to be effective. Organizations also need the flexibility to get a different view of various products, implement different workflows, and capture multiple types of client- and product content and information.
Mike drives home this point. “Data is the new oil. Once we can mine it and turn it into an operational format, we can turn it into something.”
Client 360 + Relationship 360
When all client information is aggregated in a single silo, it’s easier to get account alignment and zero-in on strategies that will save time and money. Gainsight 360 consolidates action-driving client data, from annual contract value (ACV) and renewal dates to survey responses and contacts.
Also loaded? Actionable workflows (like CTAs, renewals, engagement, and onboarding) and dynamic product-level data based on a rules engine. “Gainsight gives us visibility on the workflows that make a difference for our customers,” explains Edgar.
He points out another critical insight CS can gain from having client information all in one place: Determining if the customer is “referencable”—in other words, are they willing to advocate on your behalf to other customers.
Dive deep on dashboards
As part of the visibility journey, Edgar recommends building dashboards in two-week sprints. During those intensive periods, the CSO team schedules and conducts interviews with stakeholders across the company to determine which pieces of data they most needed to see. The deep-dive helps to align organizational priorities, too.
Next, the team presents solutions to the identified challenges along the way. If there’s no perfect solution on hand immediately, that’s okay. “I have v.1 and v.2 versions of Dashboards,” says Edgar. “Maybe we can bring value right away but not exactly as someone imagined it.”
Mindset matters, too
Edgar was just six weeks into his role at ADP when the pandemic hit. Suddenly, the ability to embrace change became a survival skill. So Edgar and his team quickly created a COVID-19 dashboard. It was an impressive team effort in generating and implementing new ideas fast. The result was a proactive/reactive center of operations that provides real-time visibility into a continually evolving situation. Flexibility was mandatory. One small example? If a client needed a report refreshed weekly rather than monthly, they could consider it done.
“Being willing to embrace change helped us handle escalations and track proactive outreach across our client base,” explains Edgar.
Gainsight’s Mike weighs in on ADP’s forward-thinking approach to a crisis. “ADP is in the business of human capital management. During the pandemic, fewer people are working, which has a definite impact on your business,” he says. “Knowing that you were helping mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on ADP’s business through Gainsight gives me a tremendous sense of pride.”
The far-reaching value of improved visibility
ADP has seen tangible benefits from working with Gainsight to increase visibility across the organization. Creating a single source of truth is a significant time- and cost-saving measure. CSMs now have the information they need to have accurate conversations with customers daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Dashboards provide real-time, actionable insights about trends. And workflows help stakeholders clearly understand what’s driving value or moving the needle within an organization.
Edgar shares one last tip about solving the visibility problem. “Ask questions, get feedback, and be willing to try new things,” he says. It’s a winning approach to customer success, business, and, no doubt, to life.
To scale visibility at your organization, take a product tour of Gainsight today.
