SUPPORTING USER SUCCESS TO PROMOTE USAGE
Sansan has been running an initiative called “Customer Success” since 2012. For a company that operates on a subscription model, the importance of acquiring new contracts and maintaining existing contracts remains the same. Currently, around 40 staff work in the independent Customer Success Department, and they are developing support for promoting usage to existing users on a daily basis.
Mr. Yasumasa Ogawa, General Manager of the Customer Success Department of the Sansan Division, says, “In the subscription model, business continues to grow by keeping the cancellation rate down. But that’s not all. If customers are satisfied, word of mouth will spread the business. Our department is in charge of promoting use in order to support ‘customer success’.”
The Customer Success Department focuses on educational activities to introduce users to ways of using Sansan and new functions. To do this, it is important to enrich the content.
Naotaka Yamada, Digital Customer Success Manager, Customer Success Department, Sansan Division, says, “The first thing is to get customers to listen to our explanations. What’s important when getting people to use the service is that they feel satisfied with it. If they understand how to use the different functions and what benefits they can expect from doing so, they will be more willing to use it.”
BUILDING A SYSTEM THAT CAN TRACK “WHO HAS VIEWED IT”
We want to do everything in a data-driven way, so it’s pointless to have a system that doesn’t collect data perfectly.
Naotaka Yamada
Sansan, Inc. Sansan Division Customer Success Department CS Planning Digital Customer Success ManagerTo this end, the company has prepared a website called “Sansan Utilization Tips” for existing users. Users can visit the site and view useful tips and video content introducing them. The Customer Success Department is trying to understand “which users are interested in Sansan and to what extent” based on the behavior of these users. However, there was a problem. Even if video content is uploaded to YouTube, it is not possible to know who is watching it.
“YouTube is free to use, but it doesn’t allow for nurturing. For us, we want to do everything in a data-driven way, so a system that doesn’t allow us to collect data perfectly is useless. For example, seminars are powerful content. However, they are mainly held in Tokyo. We want our customers in the regions to be able to watch them, but we were wondering how we could deliver them and figure out who was watching them” (Mr. Ogawa)
The company therefore decided to consider multiple video distribution platforms. The necessary requirements were to be able to see who was watching the videos, and to be able to link with marketing automation tools. After comparing the other detailed items and costs, they decided to adopt the Brightcove solution. They decided to introduce the online video hosting platform “Brightcove Video Cloud” and the video marketing automation tool “Brightcove Audience”.
One of the reasons they chose Brightcove was because it had a system that allowed users to watch videos without having to log in. In the case of this company, users who watch videos basically visit the website via targeted emails. Therefore, it is possible to identify who has watched the videos. By linking it to a marketing automation tool, this part was cleared, and it was possible to create a specification that allowed them to understand “who has watched” without having to go through the trouble of logging in.
The implementation was completed in just two weeks. Although there was some delay in the part that linked with the marketing automation tool, the settings were completed using internal resources alone. “When I contacted the sales department about the part that wasn’t working, I received a reply immediately and was able to use it in an instant. In effect, it was possible to use it in less than a few days” (Yamada).
ANALYZING USAGE RATES AND VIEWING CONDITIONS TO UNDERSTAND THE DISTANCE BETWEEN USERS
Sansan is a cloud solution, and user usage rates have already been accumulated. Now that it is also possible to understand video viewing status, it has become possible to analyze usage rates and viewing status in combination.
Mr. Yamada says, “Among users with high usage rates, there may be people who are still using the old Sansan. We are adding convenient functions one after another. We want people to know about the latest Sansan and use it more deeply.” “What we want to measure through the analysis of usage rates and viewing status is the sense of distance from such users.”
The biggest achievement of this project was being able to visualize this sense of distance. Users with high usage rates, high viewing rates and high numbers of website visits can be positioned as users with low risk of defection. On the other hand, users with low usage rates in some indicator can be targeted proactively. For example, users with low usage rates but who are actively watching videos must have a reason for their low usage rates. In the past, we only knew about usage rates, but now we can provide optimal support based on the fact that “despite the fact that the person in charge knows the functions of Sansan in depth, they have not spread throughout the company”.
The Customer Success Department created a graph with usage rates on the vertical axis and viewing status on the horizontal axis. They have visualized the users who require priority support and are already taking action.
In the future, they will also start working on turning offline seminars into online seminars, which was one of their original goals. They will be delivering on-demand training for basic Sansan operations and administrator training, which until now could only be taken on-site. This will be good news for users who are too busy to find time for training and for customers in rural areas.
“The more you use our service, the more value you get out of it. And it’s evolving all the time. To gauge the distance between us and our customers and to bring that distance closer and closer, we want to continue uploading lots of video content to the Brightcove platform and supporting our customers’ success” (Yamada).
