Use case: CS Operations & Totango Admin

We met up with our own Totango Admin, Katie Yagodnik (Director of CS Operations and Digital Programs). During our coffee chat, she shared her first "a-ha!" moment in Totango and tips for how she manages "Totango on Totango" across multiple teams and continents. 

Read more about the conversation below. And join us next time live for Coffee Chats!

 

1. CS "flavor" wheel

Katie is formally known as a "Director of CS Operations and Digital Programs," which she underscores with the importance of data oversight:

"I ensure that we have confident and actionable data. As the Totango Admin, I take a lot of pride in ensuring we can drive action at scale. It's what fuels all of these other things [on the wheel]."

Katie primarily works in Systems, Programs, and Teams. Her "Totango constellation" cup runneth over!

     

 

2. My first Totango "a-ha!" moment was...

Katie summarized two of her moments with the following anecdotes:

  • First view of health: Wow! How much better will our sales forecasting be if we can finally have a view of our customer's performance and utilization of our product. 
  • First insight for a sales rep: The rep didn't have a pulse on whether a particular customer would renew. Katie showed him how to pull up the customer's usage in Totango. They both saw that the customer was going into the system on a daily basis. Even though the customer wasn't communicating back to them, the usage was still a great indication that they would be likely to renew. (And that customer did!)

"In enabling my team on Totango, I got to watch everyone else have their own Totango a-ha moments."

 

3. How do YOU use Totango?

Katie showcased two techniques for how she uses Totango:

Use custom metrics to curate customer lists for expansion programs:

  1. Create a custom metric to help you demonstrate business results, such as increase in revenue, improved productivity, or higher quality of service.
  2. Katie showed us hers: % of licenses used = Enabled licenses / Provisioned licenses.
  3. She then created a segment with this metric where licenses used was over 85% AND health rank was good—to indicate customers who might benefit from an expansion opportunity.
  4. Bonus tip: Custom metrics also allow you to leverage "change" filters. 

Capture the date when a customer leaves "risk" successfully:

  1. Create a new date attribute in Data Modeler.
  2. Create a new SuccessPlay with a "Celebrate Milestone" action when Risk Status changes to "Closed - Recovered."
  3. Create a second SuccessPlay to trigger after the first one (or add a second action within the first play). Use an "Update Data" action. Set your new date attribute to the date the SuccessPlay runs.
  4. At the end of the quarter, pull a segment using your date as a filter to show every account that was successfully impacted by the risk play. Make note of total contract value to show immediate ROI for your awesome risk program!

4. Leaving room

Thanks to our coffee chatter friends who sweetened our brew with their own insights:

  • If you're offering multiple products and looking for a health score based off products, it could potentially work to create health based on product families.
  • If your products have different onboarding timelines, you may even consider grouping the products in that way so that you can apply different health profiles for each.
  • If you've recently rolled out multi-dimensional health, you may consider waiting a full quarter or more to gather your benchmarks before making changes to the thresholds.