What are Customers Really Saying About Your Product?

In any organization, there is data flying every which way. Customer Success Managers who work directly with those utilizing a company’s product or SaaS offering are often keepers of this data, whether they realize it or not.

Through emails, direct real-time communications (such as through Slack), and their notes in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management program, such as Salesforce) or Customer Success Platform (CSP), a picture begins to develop of who customers are and what they want out of a product or service.

However, getting to the root of what customers are really saying about your product or service can be difficult.

Mike Redd, CMO of Quala, acknowledges the giant gap between collecting data and making good use of the data available. 

 “CRMs are great for so many things. Unfortunately, it’s also where insightful notes about customer interactions go to die,” Redd quips. He expands on this idea, offering the following: Data collected in organizations regarding customer interaction is typically from the CRM, such as Salesforce. When frontline workers put notes into Salesforce, it typically becomes very captive and hard to mine.

Quala has emerged as a way to mine through data that was previously captive and quantify what customers are saying. 

The Data That Matters

Figuring out what data to mine, why it matters, and how to apply what you have learned from such data can be a sizable task for any company, especially when added to the other tasks necessary to keep a business running successfully. 

 Quala integrates with key systems to ferret out vital information to get to the root of customer interactions. These include: 

– How often are features mentioned? 

– Which customers are talking about these features?

– How valuable are those customers to the organization? 

Quala can tell you what customers are saying and where they are saying it. Quala is a Google Partner and Microsoft Partner and can easily mine information from Gmail and Outlook interactions. 

 “An individual can search their own email, but they can’t easily search all of the emails between one business and another business,” explains Redd. Quala allows organizations to mine data across many platforms and sources and compile that data into a complete picture of customer interaction. 

Customer Success Teams Drive Strategy

Information from Customer Success teams drive strategy in organizations but often lack access to data to back up recommendations. The teams know what customers need but are often asked for hard data to prove their cases. And there has never been an easy way to mine all that data across multiple sources before.

With Quala, “Leaders can make informed choices,” says Redd. With all of the data collected and quantified, Customer Success team members can cite relevant information and provide fact-based recommendations to leadership teams. 

Customer success roles are one of the fastest-growing positions in the software industry, the COVID-19 pandemic having a significant influence on the growth of the position. The influence wielded by the position plays a definite role in this growth. Throughout the uncertainty of the pandemic, organizations were concerned with customer retention. 

 “Quala has definitely benefited from that growth,” says Redd, “Teams are in this mixed mode of working at home and in the office. The question becomes, how do you create that institutional glue, that memory? How do you pull together the signal through all of the noise?” 

Finding the clear signal among the noise is Quala’s primary objective. The amount of data exchanged within any business interaction can be staggering. 

“At the heart of what we are doing, we are helping businesses get closer to their customers. There is so much missed opportunity, and risk of missing what customers really need, that we are working to help our customers better serve their customers. And that’s just good business,,” says Redd. 

Organizations are in the business of delivering value, no matter their industry or their product. Quala is in the business of helping its customers deliver more value to their customers by unlocking the insights of day-to-day customer interactions, both to better serve individual customers and to better serve their overall book of business.

“Every SaaS leader we’ve spoken to knows it’s critical to be close to customers”, says Redd. “Quala is helping these businesses find the signal through all the noise.”