How UXCam went from Using Five Tools to Just One for Customer Success

Many businesses aim to streamline workflows and decrease techstacks – but how can you do it successfully? And how can a Customer Success team do it, and become even better?

For UXCam, a leader in mobile app experience analytics, its success factor is giving its Customer Success team the best possible setup in order to provide maximum value for both customers and critically the entire organization.

We spoke to Susan Ostojska, Vice President of Customer Success at UXCam, who explains how her CS team reduced the complexity of its CS workflow, took control of customer data, and embraced automation – slashing repetitive tasks.

What motivated you to begin using a customer platform?

Susan Ostojska, Vice President of Customer Success at UXCam: The main challenge for us was that we didn’t have a single source of truth about our customers. Neither did we have a good way of managing our customers and tasks.

We used Hubspot as our CRM and we also used it to keep track of tasks – but we didn’t have enough information about how our customers used our platform. We had something, but it wasn’t enough.

To make matters worse, when reaching out to customers to check how they were doing we had to go through five different tools. We didn’t have a trigger-based setup either, so we didn’t know if a customer was at risk. Everything was manual, and after all of these processes we still didn’t have enough insight or information. The time was right to move on.

How critical is it that CS teams are taking control of data and using automation?

Susan Ostojska: I think it’s super important because more and more CS work will be linked to revenue. When I started working in CS a few years ago, it was always about customers being happy and getting value, but now it’s also about reflecting in company revenue. Each project should have clear outcomes measured by specific KPIs. If we design new onboarding, we need to know what we want to optimize for and see if the results, e.g. time to value, improve in a few months. Data is important to prove initiatives and show their impact.

I also feel that CS teams need to be more self-sufficient and have better access to resources and technical support. My goal this year is to automate all KPIs and reporting, and have good visibility for the team and company.

How has Planhat helped you to consolidate and organize your data?

Susan Ostojska: It’s one of the main benefits! We now have everything in one place. Different teams still use different tools. For example, Marketing still uses Hubspot. But then we push the data from Hubspot to Planhat, and that helps us a lot.

It’s very useful to have all the filters, as it enables each CSM to look at their portfolio and examine their customers individually. We also really like the customer view, seeing all the customer activity clearly: who was active recently, recent emails, tasks, playbooks, and so on. That’s something that is very, very useful.

What have been the other changes you have made since using Planhat?

Susan Ostojska: Initially, we used it for just monitoring our users, and company activity, building a few basic playbooks, and automating a handful of tasks.

Fast forward, and we now use a lot of automations and data triggers to notify us when something happens. For example, if a user is not logging in, or when a user hits a limit – and there is the potential for an upsell.

We’ve improved how we use playbooks as well – now they are much more complicated. We also began using NPS in Planhat. Saving money by moving away from a single tool for NPS to manage it through Planhat instead.

Recently we added dashboards for our Enterprise CSMs customers, and are using the customer intelligence feature more.

Today, we have a good view on our customer portfolio, not only looking at the health of our customers, but seeing their activity, and how it changes over time.

You use Planhat for both high and low touch models. Could you describe that?

Susan Ostojska: We have a high touch approach for our Enterprise and mid-market customers and use playbooks, portals and checklists. Also the notes are super useful to keep track of what happened with the customer. It´s connected with Intercom so we´re aware of all the new support conversations. It gives us a good overview of our portfolio and customers’ stages, and helps us understand who to reach out to and what to do with them.For low touch we can still improve how we use Planhat but the triggers are super helpful. We’re not able to be proactive with each customer so we have both positive and negative triggers that help us find the right moment to reach out.

Does using automations expand your CS team’s capabilities?

Susan Ostojska: Yes, that was definitely one of our goals when we introduced Planhat. We wanted to spend less time on the operational job, and have more time preparing good content for our customers. We use triggers to help us identify when to reach out to the customer, and playbooks to understand what the best next steps are. In the future, we will add even more automation to our work, for example we are looking into sending automated emails when something specific happens.

Have you been able to be more efficient and reduce costs by using Planhat?

Susan Ostojska: I’m sure we do, simply because we now spend less time per customer in terms of checking account statuses, or reviewing information on how active they all are. Plus, all the data is in one place, rather than five tools!

All our processes are much smoother. If you ask anyone from the CS team, they would tell you that we save a lot of time just by having everything in one tool.

But we also know more about our customers too. For example, if a Jira ticket is created, it’s integrated with Planhat, meaning we get notifications that a ticket was created for one of our customers. That’s very useful. Not only have we cut repetitive manual tasks, but we now know more about our customers.

How important do you think sustainability and profitability will be for CS teams in 2023?

Susan Ostojska: I think it’s going to be very important for CS teams to prove their ROI and that it makes sense to keep the CS team – especially during the current economic crisis. Companies will have limited budgets and will need to look at the numbers to make difficult decisions. Therefore, CS teams will have to be responsible for a part of the revenue and show the profitability of their teams and efficiency. It’s going to be much different than it was before.

I think on the one hand, you have to be customer-centric, but there has to be a return on investment (ROI) for what you do. Unfortunately, it can’t just be about happiness, because happiness is not enough to keep the customer.

How do you find the renewal process now you use Planhat?

Susan Ostojska: Yes, we have playbooks for that too and it reminds us of all the necessary steps. Thanks to that, we are well organized and can run the process professionally.

What has your overall experience been like using Planhat?

Susan Ostojska: Me and my team have had a really good experience using Planhat – and not just because of all the custom metrics and dashboards. I really like the integrations. It has a lot of native integrations with the tools that we use such as Hubspot and Jira.

This is very helpful, because without using developers, we can get access to a lot of data. I like that it’s fast and easy to send data to Planhat.

I now also have a really good overview of what our CSMs in the team struggle with, which customers are difficult, and which ones are doing well and so on.

Overall, I would say UXcam gets a lot of value from Planhat. I simply can’t imagine not having the platform anymore. It would be a disaster to go back to the processes we had before.

What is the thing that makes you go “I can’t live without this”?

Susan Ostojska: The good overview of customers and the data filtering. We record a lot of events in the platform, so we have good data about user activities, and what exactly they do in UXCam.

We now have better knowledge of our customers, from different perspectives, from activity to their overall health as well. Plus, we have NPS there – feedback is incredibly important.

Today, we have visibility at every stage of the customer’s journey – something we can’t afford to lose.

Want to know more about Planhat’s Customer Platform?

Filters, playbooks, and the ability to make all customer data accessible in one place is the success factor for UxCamp. If you would like to see for yourself how a Customer Platform can benefit your brand sign up for a demo of Planhat now.

Or, if you would like to find out more about how UXCam uses Planhat, download our our recent case study. In it your will learn how UXcam leverages Planhat to create a single source of truth for all their customer data.