I have been with iDashboards for several years, and in that time I have indulged in some ideas for programs and other initiatives I believed would benefit our company. Unfortunately, any time a new program idea surfaced, it brought with it a cost – whether for labor, time, or some overall capital cost.
So, the question remains, “How do we justify the cost to the company?” Well, let me show you how I did using iDashboards.
I recently had a hypothesis that if we are more proactive with customer outreach, we could lessen the amount of customers that do not renew their support and maintenance agreement. I also had the idea that we could inform them about new services that could help with any obstacles they are experiencing.
Like many companies, we have the data needed to prove the viability of a program and its cost. As the world moves toward data-driven decisions, the need for data visualization increases. Luckily, in my case, the data has been growing for several years, and therefore contains invisible trends. The problem that arose, however, was that the necessary data was locked in our data warehouse.
I was able to gather the information from the online warehouse and insert it into a database.
This task can be performed in many ways. The most commonly used are JDBC and ODBC drivers that allow connections to various vendor APIs. The most difficult part of this process was sifting through the data points and extracting the data from the different systems.
Once the data had been collected, I decided which metrics I needed to utilize in order to prove my theory and determine if there was evidence within the data to support my idea. In this case, I was looking at customer renewal rates for customers that had contacted support across a selected range of dates.
I consulted the data to find out if there was some correlation between the frequency in which a customer contacts support and the customer’s rate of renewal. I hypothesized that there would be a correlation, but still wondered to what extent. After looking at renewal rates by organization for customers that had at least one interaction with support, as opposed to those who had no interaction with support at all, I started to see there was a much greater retention rate with those who had used our support services.
Now that I found there was a substantial correlation, I needed to find more evidence.
Some additional metrics I was interested in were the percentages of customer drop-offs at each additional point of contact. I also became interested in the number of new customer adoptions in relation to non-renewals. By demonstrating these two metrics in a scatter chart depicting a trend line, I was able to provide some insight.
We discovered that more of our customers are choosing to renew our support and maintenance agreement. With this data, it became immediately evident that our customers trust that our product releases and support are worth the cost.
With these findings in mind, iDashboards will begin focusing more resources toward customer outreach. It is important to us that our customers keep the iDashboards initiative moving forward. And, if there is anything we can do to help them, we should be able point them in the direction of the resources to do so.
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