Buyer’s Guide for Customer Success Management: Totango I’m in the process of writing profiles of vendors in the customer success management industry. These vendor profiles are a tool for buyers to evaluate their customer success management options before selecting a vendor. In addition to an overview of the vendor, these documents identify key differentiators, product offerings, and provide a number of features that should help a client create short list when determining which vendor to put on out an RFI or RFP. The first vendor I profiled is ServiceSource®.
This post is about Totango. If you’d like a peek at the table of contents for this report and an excerpt, along with the full report, you can find it here.
Executive Overview: Totango Customer Success Management
Totango, a vendor of cloud software for Customer Success Management (CSM), was founded in Israel and later moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley. Today, it maintains two offices, one in San Mateo, California and one in Tel Aviv, Israel. Guy Nirpaz leads the company as CEO and co-founder. Prior to starting Totango, he worked in the area of real-time Big Data as executive vice president of engineering at GigaSpaces Technologies, a middleware provider. He also worked as chief architect at Mercury Interactive, part of the Hewlett Packard software division.
What Does Totango Do? With subscription and recurring revenue models on the rise in software, Totango helps clients improve product adoption and advocacy, reduce customer churn, and maximize customer lifetime revenue. Today’s cloud businesses have unprecedented data and visibility into user behavior and the business results achieved by their customers. Totango monitors this data to eliminate the guesswork when it comes to understanding customer health and engagement.
What Are the Benefits of Using Totango? Using Totango, companies can pinpoint at-risk accounts that need attention; spot opportunities to increase user engagement and boost revenue; and then formalize and implement customer success best practices to scale up customer success operations across a growing customer base.
What Companies Currently Use Totango? Totango is used by some of the fastest-growing technology companies, including public companies like Zendesk and Autodesk; mid-stage companies like BigCommerce and Jobvite; and innovative startups like Optimizely and Mixpanel.
Category Overview of Customer Success Management
Before the opt-in economy, many businesses focused on the initial sale. Organizations spent a significant amount of money on advertising and marketing to potential prospects. The goal – enticing them to convert from a lead to a sale. Despite decades of research showing that after-sales service directly affects the financial stability of a company, organizations paid little attention to the after-sale experience and financial longevity of the client. Consequently, organizations never should have spent millions, or in some cases, billions of dollars in advertising, marketing and sales to then drive the customer to a competitor when the after-sales service experience was horrible. Yet, poor after-sales service occurs every single day in many, many companies.
What is Customer Success Management? Customer Success Management (CSM) is based on the ability to deliver a consistent customer experience process – before, during, and in particular, after the sale – which results in maximized customer lifetime value and enhanced revenue that leads to increased margins and profits. A shift to CSM happened because we live in a continuous, opt-in economy, where the value of customers is determined by how long they stay customers and if they continue to increase their purchase amounts over time. Because of our opt-in economy, companies must prepare themselves to deliver great, continuous and consistent customer experiences.
Why Has Customer Success Management Become Such a Big Deal? This seismic shift to a post-sale, on demand, attention economy transforms the value exchange among customers, partners, suppliers, and brands. And as organizations move to digital business models, CSM plays a critical role in enabling brands and organizations to keep and deliver their brand promise as well as enhance their bottom line.
My POV: How to Choose a Customer Success Management Vendor: When choosing the best option for CSM software for your organization, the choice will depend on the business goals of CSM initiatives, the degree to which CSM has been integrated into your culture and how well employees have adopted this mindset. It may be that some organizations will be further along the adoption cycle, while others will need internal champions to encourage and enforce the use of customer success software, processes and best practices. It’s never been more important make sure that customers are happy not only when they buy the software, but also after they have bought it. Otherwise, in this opt-in economy, clients may opt out of using a vendor, to look for a vendor that can deliver on their promise of great customer experience, increased revenue and decreased costs.
@DrNatalie, VP and Analyst Principal Analyst
