Underrated CS Skills Part I: Data Analysis
There are certain undeniable traits that make an excellent CSM. Coupled with two well developed skills, Customer Success Professionals can become one of the top employees in their org.
This is the first of a two-part series in exploring two underrated skills in the CS profession: data analysis and project management (which we’ll talk about in part 2).
Regardless of your title in Customer Success, you’d be hard pressed to find a skill that pays more dividends than learning how to interpret and tell a story through data.
Data has been making waves in the Enterprise in the form of SaaS business applications. Each SaaS application with the intent of making our lives more automated and productive. But with the hyper rise of SaaS business applications, this simultaneously means an exponential increase in the amount of data we collect.
Data sitting in our CRM about our customers, our support application about ticket history, invoice system about payments. HBR recently describes this phenomenon in an article talking about the analytics revolution:
We’re in the middle of an analytics revolution. The change is being driven by numerous factors, but two are more important than all of the rest. The first is an explosion in the amount of valuable digital data generated by workers and consumers as we go about our daily lives. The second is advances in technology, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud-computing platforms that allow us to interpret and leverage these vast amounts of data.
Yet companies that excel with analytics have more than access to great data and technology. These companies recognize that success with analytics also requires an analytical mindset among its executives and an analytical culture in the business.
Sitting at the middle of this rise in data is the Customer Success Manager. The person responsible for sifting through and interpreting data from often 10+ data sources. As Customer Success has risen to prominence, it is successful data analysis that has fueled Customer Success’s growth.
CSMs are bombarded with health scores, license utilization, feature usage, support tickets and a number of other key data points. That’s why the secret weapon to any Customer Success Professional’s toolbox is the ability to interpret, analyze, and tell a story through data. The ability to look at key data points, and make a snap judgement on whether a customer is at risk or not. The ability to make sense of key data points versus the noise, and articulate the “why” behind a data point to a customer. It’s this connecting fabric, connecting the what to the why, which is critically important for CSMs to deliver to customers.
Fortunately there’s a number of online & in-person resources to help you develop the analytics muscle:
Above are a few resources that come to mind, many of which are free.
Happy analyzing!
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