The identity and access management company Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications. They also help developers build identity controls into applications, website web services, and devices. In short, Okta is helping us build a more secure digital workplace and world.
The company’s Customer Success (CS) team has been leading the first wave of the Digital CS revolution. But they had a problem: Okta found 85% of their customers (21,000 accounts) were only digitally covered. To make matters worse, they were exhibiting unhealthy usage behavior, like low product adoption early on. This often went unchecked and led to poor retention.
Okta’s Story
Melissa Allen, Senior Manager of Customer Success Operations at Okta explains the company’s journey with Digital CS.
Okta’s Solution to Drive Adoption at Scale—Digitally
Forgot your earbuds? Here’s a breakdown of the video.
Okta created a data-driven program to identify low-adopting customers and reach out to them via automated and human touchpoints to modify behavior.
Here’s how they build it step by step:
- First they consolidated disparate data sources into a single view in Gainsight:
- Health Scores for digital-only customers
- Product usage telemetry
- Admin contact details
- They built complex queries to join the datasets and filter to targeted accounts/admins. This gave them a single 360 view of digital-only customers.
- They designed 11 email variant templates covering the different adoption behaviors they wanted to drive, personalized to each recipient’s specific telemetry data.
- They determined a 45-day time period to assess initial onboarding activity across community engagement, training, support cases, license usage, etc.
- They set up a Journey Orchestrator flow to:
- Identify low-adopting customers
- Send personalized email variants
- Wait two weeks
- If no action was taken, create a CSM call-to-action
- They leveraged Gainsight reporting and integrations with Tableau to analyze email performance and cohort modeling, as well as to correlate adoption to renewal rates.
This analysis fed back into future iterations, helping the Okta team optimize messaging, expand target segments beyond the initial 6,000 accounts, and incorporate learnings into their broader engagement strategy.
Okta’s Take on Automations
The Results Speak Volumes
By leveraging automation and human touchpoints, Okta was able to successfully modify low-usage behavior among digital-only customers, positively impacting adoption, retention, and satisfaction:
- 20% of program participants adopted at least one of the behaviors targeted.
- 22% of customers escalated to human specialists resolved their issues.
- 42% increased their community engagement score after outreach.
- 28% higher average Health Score for program participants.
- 12.5% higher renewal rate for program participants vs non-participants.
- 25.5% increase in adoption for program participant sover time.
This is just a glimpse into Okta’s innovative approach. To learn more, check out our webinar, Okta’s Digital Customer Success Journey.
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