Vena connects people, existing systems, and data to power finance-led business planning and real-time reporting. Founded in 2011, Vena’s growth is skyrocketing. The company is the fastest-growing provider of cloud-based financial planning and analysis software.
Vena didn’t get there by accident. Its customer-centric goal to deliver a great customer experience (CX) has been key to its success.
Read on to find out how Vena’s CX strategy evolved from unhelpful feedback to an automated insight engine.
The Mystery of Missing Feedback
Vena found that massive growth also brought some challenges. Possessed with a strong desire to scale and improve the customer experience, Vena’s team began tracking Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) as their two key performance metrics.
As Vena’s team, led by Shivam Shah, Customer Experience Operations Manager, looked at incoming data, they hit an unexpected wall: Almost all of the feedback was positive. The team’s suspicions were aroused. Were they really that good or were surveys only being distributed by happy customers?
The team soon discovered that due to the manual distribution of NPS and CSAT surveys, there was a bias in only positive feedback being recorded. Meanwhile, negative feedback was left unheard.
“The worst feedback you can get is something that you cannot follow up on or act upon,” says Shivam Shah, Customer Experience Operations Manager, Vena.
Net Promoter Score Surveys can help measure customer loyalty after each interaction.
GetFeedback with Salesforce
With a clearer understanding of the problem, Shivam and his team began exploring solutions. The team realized that they needed to automate their NPS and CSAT survey distribution to capture a wider range of customer feedback. Vena used Salesforce as their CRM, which meant there was a straightforward solution for this problem: GetFeedback’s top-rated Salesforce integration. Shivam integrated the two platforms, enabling Vena to automatically survey customers at numerous points in the customer journey, including:
Semiannual NPS surveys
CSAT surveys after every support interaction through GetFeedback’s one-touch email surveys
New customer discovery surveys
Surveys to gauge the effectiveness of new customer training
Shivam describes GetFeedback’s Salesforce integration as one of his favorite features of the platform: “The integration with Salesforce has made my life a thousand times easier… On a monthly average, automating surveys probably saves us between twenty and thirty hours of manual labor.”
Taking Action on Customer Feedback
With GetFeedback integrated into Salesforce, Vena could count on accurate customer feedback coming in at various points throughout the customer journey.
Automated surveys successfully captured data from the full spectrum of Vena’s customer base, both the satisfied and unsatisfied customers. In addition, the team enabled reminder emails for incomplete surveys, which led to a 120% increase in response rates.
The 360 customer feedback highlighted issues and prompted some internal changes as well. Armed with more accurate data, Vena’s Operations team was ready to take action.
Try asking for feedback after onboarding customers to ensure they are fully satisfied.
Better Onboarding
Customer feedback revealed inconsistencies in Vena’s onboarding process. Individual Customer Success Managers (CSMs) had their own process, leading to wildly different experiences for every customer. If a CSM left the organization or was out of the office, new customers would acutely feel the impact as they were handed off to another CSM with a different way of doing business.
In turn, Vena’s team developed a standardized onboarding process and every CSM was retrained on the new method. Step by step processes were put in place that allowed seamless transitions between CSMs if transfers were to happen. More importantly, the actions they took based on feedback ensured every new customer had an ideal and uniform onboarding experience.
Using Customer Satisfaction Surveys can help measure agent performance.
New Team Incentives
In addition to onboarding inconsistencies, customer feedback highlighted a concerning issue with team performances. CSMs were compensated based upon individual NPS, goals which sometimes led to CSM’s focusing on only their customers rather than the success of all customers.
The team worked with senior leadership to devise a new compensation plan to drive the right behaviors. Instead of being based on individual goals, the new plan was based on a team NPS goal. This incentivised teamwork with a focus on providing an excellent experience for every customer. The new plan changed the way the team functioned and now they operate as a collective.
So how did these changes affect the business?
The Results
The new approach was quickly validated by the incoming feedback data. After the initial (expected) dip in their scores due to the addition of feedback from unsatisfied customers, Vena saw dramatic increases in both NPS and CSAT:
NPS scores jumped dramatically within a few months, increasing +17 points from +34 to +51—very strong numbers in the industry.
In the second quarter of 2019 their overall CSAT score was 93%, with their total score for the year forecasted to come in at 91%.
Thrilled about the improvement and the anticipated increase in customer renewals, Vena showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, the company began using GetFeedback to build out surveys for other parts of the business including Sales, Marketing, and Product to elevate the prospect and customer journey to new heights.
The Key to Evolving Customer Experience
Vena realized that it’s nearly impossible to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience without first having accurate data on your customer’s current experience and expectations.
After reflecting on his experience, Shivam Shah shares his recommendation for how other organizations can achieve similar results:
“First, understand what you’re trying to collect or what you’re trying to measure. You really need to understand your business processes and your KPIs, then massage your surveys to adapt to that.”
Vena's focus on customer experience is enabling them to take the business finance world by storm.
Shivam Shah has been at Vena since 2017 and has spent most of his career in the SaaS industry leading and bringing operational excellence. He is the pillar for cross-collaboration across the CXS function working with teams such as, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Product to ensure the Customer Experience remains consistent while focusing on the tools and strategy to scale and support the growth of the business. At Vena, he's helped transform the company from an early stage start-up into a hyper growth company.
Learn more about Vena.
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