Conductor aligns the company and increases user value

The challenge

Conductor is a technology company with a passion for helping marketing teams create and optimize content so that it gets found, answers questions, and solves problems for real people. Central to Conductor’s vision is helping customers humanize marketing and create more relevant content. To do this, internal teams at Conductor—Product, Sales, Customer Success and Services—are all focused on making sure the platform delivers value, and that customers recognize the value they’re getting.As Conductor has grown—the company now serves thousands of customers—it became critical for the organization to share a common understanding of customer engagement. For example:

• Did usage of certain features have a higher impact on likelihood of renewal?

• Did overall “time in the platform” indicate user and account engagement?

While the Product team depended on Heap to understand user and account engagement, Conductor lacked a standard methodology and data source for defining account health metrics across the company. Different teams relied on disparate tools and processes, making it challenging to unify adoption efforts across the company. The Customer Success and Product teams partnered to establish Heap as the company’s standard for user analytics because of Heap’s granularity of measurement, ability to customize, and ease of integrating with Conductor’s workflows and systems.

Insights that find you

Historically, the Account Teams struggled to drive engagement because they lacked easy access to the data, and even when they could get customer usage reports from Product, weren’t quite sure which behaviors drove adoption and renewal.

To solve the first problem, Conductor joined Heap’s Report Alerts and Salesforce Connector Beta Program, so that usage insights from Heap could be easily delivered across the organization and viewed in people’s existing workflows and tools.

The first quick win was having the Product team identify user types and the features that they cared about in Heap, so that those fields could be surfaced in Salesforce. This let other teams check account and user health from within Salesforce, and turned Salesforce into the site from which the Product Team, Account Teams, and Services Team work together to coordinate adoption efforts.

The account health check helps Conductor prioritize accounts for immediate outreach and where to focus training. When account health metrics cross certain thresholds, key team members are alerted and the Account team follows a specific playbook to re-engage customers.

As customers request customized reporting and analytics, the Services team can now verify the customer’s usage of Conductor and account health from within Salesforce. The Services team can deliver the analytics request and, more importantly, train customers on how to create similar insights and reports independently in the future.

The Salesforce Connector has also freed up the Product team, which had been spending significant time and resources on ad-hoc requests from the Account teams. In fact, since going live with the Salesforce Connector, the Product team has not received a single request from the Account teams for additional reports or data!

Similarly, the Product team utilizes Report Alerts to notify stakeholders via email or Slack that specific usage indicators have crossed key thresholds. Both Report Alerts and Salesforce Connector will enable Conductor to develop automated and scalable adoption processes, such as automated email campaigns.

Defining and driving user value

Heap-powered insights also support a broader strategic initiative to understand how customers interact and gain value from the Conductor platform.

The Product team created a composite “User Value” score based on over 80 behaviors measured within Heap. These user behaviors are classified based on the implied “value” that the action reflects (i.e., when a user saves a specific report, it is considered more valuable than when a user simply spends time-on-page as the latter may indicate that the user is either engaged or frustrated, while the former demonstrates that the report has delivered enough value to be saved).

As part of this analysis, the Product team used Heap insights to identify the activities within the Conductor platform that were most predictive of account renewal. While all usage, and specifically reporting, is correlated with renewal, when users create custom reports, there is a  higher likelihood of renewal. Additionally, using reports related to individual keywords or URLs (i.e., reports on improving the content of a URL or improving the ranking for a specific keyword search term) also ranked as more “valuable” by customers.

The concept of “User Value,” powered by Heap Insights, has changed how Conductor approaches on-boarding and adoption efforts. First, the Account team created dedicated roles aimed at improving customers’ utilization of the platform. These roles track which and how many “valuable” activities users are performing within Conductor, to see where additional training and enablement might be needed.

Conductor additionally revamped its onboarding process to focus on the platform features that are most valuable to users, and that ultimately lead to stickiness and renewal. The Sales teams are more confident in pursuing longer term contracts because they know that customers are recognizing value earlier.The more detailed behavior metrics that contribute to the “User Value” metric are leveraged to optimize engineering investments and resourcing. In fact, insights gathered in Heap supported the deprecation of high-cost features several times in the past year alone.

Understanding the features generating the most value for users creates laser-focus from Product, Sales, Customer Success and Services Teams to build, promote, and enable usage of high-value features.

The customer is at the center of Conductor – and knowing what in the platform was working, what wasn’t working, and where and when users recognize value is critical to achieving that vision. Heap insights are the foundation for how Conductor measures and drives account health and “user value”-  starting with product development, through sales, on-boarding, adoption and training, and continued outreach.