The 2016 CRM Market Rising Stars: Totango Monitors Customers to Ensure They're Successful

Just as it takes two to tango, it takes two entities to keep a customer relationship alive: the company and the customer. Totango knows this well, which is why the six-year-old company decided in 2013 that it would focus exclusively on customer success, according to Maksim Ovsyannikov, Totango’s chief product officer. “CRM tools like Salesforce.com do a very good job of managing the funnel, acquiring leads, and sales automation, but they do a very, very bad job with what happens after you’ve actually acquired the customer,” Ovsyannikov says. Over the past year Totango has made several moves to help companies nurture their customers as they use its products and services.

In June of 2015, Totango released ROI Metrics, which enables firms to keep track of the monetary returns customers are getting as a result of using their products. A company can leverage Totango’s capabilities to assess the health scores of its customers, which are generated based on the impact the company’s product has on its customers’ revenue and overall financial performance, rather than on more arbitrary metrics such as customer satisfaction.

Totango also enhanced its Early Warning System in July with SuccessPlays and Account Scorecards. The updated offering helps users identify accounts that are at risk, or ready for an upgrade, and to take action accordingly. According to Ovsyannikov, this is “probably the most brilliant part of the platform,” as it focuses on ensuring that customers perform better and decreases the likelihood that they churn, which can in turn generate additional upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Totango also improved its platform in September with Customer Success Campaigns, which aims to help businesses communicate with buyers who have begun using one or more of their products. “If you’ve ever received an email from Fitbit that tells you how you did last week, that’s a customer communication that’s 100 percent around your success as a customer of Fitbit, and that’s exactly the kind of use case that we support with our Customer Success Campaigns,” Ovsyannikov says.

And most recently, in March, Totango introduced its Enterprise Edition for account management, to help businesses with subscription-based models to stay aligned with their clients’ goals and ultimately improve their chances of collecting recurring revenues.