Totango Releases ROI Metrics to Help Companies Monitor Product Performance

Totango, a provider of cloud-based customer success management tools, yesterday announced the release of ROI Metrics, which aims to help companies more precisely measure product performance among customers.

According to Kaiser Mulla-Feroze, chief marketing officer at Totango, all too often brands rely on ineffective metrics to determine customer health. "Measurements like customer satisfaction surveys, NPS scores, or the number of existing customer support tickets are subjective," Mulla-Feroze says. "How often [does a company] run a satisfaction survey? And what does that tell [it] about the health of [its] customers?"

ROI Metrics tries to fill those gaps. The package builds on Totango's customer engagement platform, which uses sensors to keep track of data that flows across specified Web pages. The Formula Builder feature allows users to create custom metrics that offer insights into ROI in particular areas. Those results can also be used to compose customer profiles and reports that can be shared throughout a company. ROI Metrics can allow a hotel, for example, to gauge how much extra revenue has been generated by an app allowing customers to upgrade to better rooms.

For Totango, the release is a further push to steer companies toward the customer engagement data that can be collected from their own products. Mulla-Feroze suggests that the information companies can glean from their own apps can be just as valuable as the data they store in CRM and ERP systems. He believes that as more businesses adopt subscriptions models, it will become increasingly important to create ways to generate revenue with existing customers. "Over time, the revenue that you get from your existing customers shadows the revenue that you're going to get from your new customers, given the way that the business model works," Mulla-Feroze says. "Companies like Netflix and Amazon have excelled at understanding what users are doing, and what experiences they're having within their applications and services. Those companies have a clear revenue edge on the market because of this. That's what we're trying to get across to an entire terrain of digital and subscription businesses."

Experts working in the space agree that tools to operationalize customer health data are welcome. "Sometimes brands need help seeing how looking at the customer experience will relate to things like long-term customer lifetime value," says Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, principal analyst at Constellation Research. She points out that companies will often neglect the 90 percent of forum users who typically don't comment on a product, instead feeding off what the 10 percent who do comment are saying. "Brands can get left in the dark and suddenly go out of business, not realizing how unhappy customers were, or that the business was in trouble. Because those brands are not paying attention, they don’t know what customers feel."

"Digital business models reward the post-sale, on-demand, attention economy," adds Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research. "What happens after the sale is the long tail in value creation, especially as we are buying products and services in smaller increments."