Dan Darcy
Chief Customer Officer
Qualified
United States of America
Qualified provides extra data sources for the many Salesforce users around the world, allowing them to build better interactions by developing a better profile of customers visiting websites and improving personalisation. Ranking highly on customer review sites, Qualified attributes its success to its philosophy of 'Whatever It Takes'. And this translates into daily people, process and technology objectives for Dan.
From the people point of view, everyone at the organisation has been trained in the philosophy to understand that it is more than just a regular customer success team. Customer success managers have been replaced by Qualified success architects, who not only deal with the hands-on technical implementation and best practice consultancy, but also act as Salesforce-certified account managers connecting the dots from a business perspective. There's also a customer programmes team focused on Voice of the Customer, NPS/CSAT and customer reviews, and a university team helping to drive customer education and training.
Processes that have been implemented include monthly KPI/ROI reviews with customers, to discuss dashboard results and gauge how satisfied the customer is with the value they're receiving; a Voice of the Customer programme involving live interviews and surveys to feedback into the CX strategy; the sharing of customer stories at every bi-weekly company calls and on the organisation's Slack; and quarterly executive strategic reviews where strategic objectives are reviewed with customer execs to ensure alignment and progress with the customer strategy. Also introduced was the Pipeline Cloud 100 Program - where executive sponsors across the business have been assigned to the top 100 customers to provide extra assistance with their strategy.
As a Salesforce-native platform, Salesforce tracks its Whatever it Takes success methodology along with taking its Qualified utilisation metrics, pushing this data onto Qualified's success record in Salesforce for transparency. In turn, Qualified has built a “Customer Happiness Score” utilising this success data, the product data, and other metrics that are around the customer. This happiness score is then used to predict where the customer is and any potential churn.
Through these initiatives, the organisation has driven increasingly strong ROI, Gross Revenue Retention/Net Revenue Retention (GRR/NRR) numbers, as well as rating highly with customer reviews on G2 and AppExchange. And with the 'Whatever It Takes' customer philosophy so intrinsic to its culture and strategy, it will have also had a major influence when it successfully raised $95 million in a Series C round of funding earlier this year.
Internally, success really has a seat at the table with all of our internal stakeholders and we are involved and instrumental across all our deals in sales, driving customer stories and content in marketing, driving product feedback with our product and engineering teams. Externally, customers have us speak to their success team, they copy our content and process and we are open to driving a true partnership.
