CUSTOMER STORY

How Voiceflow elevates customer experience with product usage insights

About
Conversational AI product teams use Voiceflow to design, test, and ship chat and voice assistants.
integrations
With Calixa, we go into every conversation with a data-driven perspective on core feature usage and who our champions are.

Voiceflow helps teams design, prototype, collaborate and ship conversational apps across any voice or chat channel. As a player in the PLG space, their product is used by individuals, small teams and enterprises alike.

Goal

We chatted with Daniel D'Souza who leads Voiceflow's Customer Success team. His team is responsible for all enterprise accounts, from agencies to huge retailers like Home Depot and banks such as US Bank.

Daniel believes Voiceflow can and should deliver a proactive experience to customers that drives net revenue retention (for success) and expansion deals (for sales). But an array of Sales and Success tools doesn’t always proactively empower this.

As with many PLG companies, Voiceflow is a mix of enterprise and B2C. We're selling to new customers, but we also have a ton of individual users who are all using the product for their unique everyday needs. Sorting through the noise and finding our accounts with the highest potential was a daily struggle.”

Challenge

Voiceflow's growth was the primary catalyst for standardizing around a modern data stack. With the Sales team growing from 1 to 5 reps and customer Success tripling, it quickly became clear they needed a scalable process to get the data they necessary to do their job. 

“As our GTM teams started to grow, we needed a platform that would make it easy for an AE, or CSM to actually understand the buyer journey – such as how trials are performing or how a prospect is using our tool, and then be able to turn those into actionable insights.”

Without a dedicated GTM platform for their product-led motion, Sales and Success reps encountered 3 main challenges:

1. Limited data access

Customer trials are an integral part of the Voiceflow Sales motion, but reps were left with little visibility into which trials were going well and which were going to expire without converting.

For example, Daniel describes a world where reps would login to Intercom to search for when a user was last seen. “The data we had access to in Intercom was extremely limited. We could only see when a user last logged in rather than how they are actually utilizing the tool...and just because someone logged in a couple of days ago doesn't mean they're actually using your tool at all.”

2. Lack of GTM-ready product analytics

Voiceflow had implemented Mixpanel for product analytics, but they often had to involve developers for help in digesting and accessing that data for GTM purposes. 

Daniel routinely wanted to go from a high level account health view to zoom in on individual user behavior. This was tricky in Mixpanel. “If you don't understand how our data is set up, Mixpanel is difficult to navigate. It was essential that we found a tool that was easy for both Sales and Success to use self-sufficiently.”

3. Manual reporting

Manually keeping track of individual usage on top accounts was a laborious process. Multiple times a week, Daniel would have to calculate and report on the "product scores" (an internal metric based on how active an account was) of each customer. This process would take him anywhere from 2-4 hours and always opened up unnecessary rabbit holes. Searching for and tracking inactive accounts took another 1-2 hours per week. 

In the end Daniel recalls, “It was a black box. We didn't have any idea how prospects were using Voiceflow or even a means of easily seeing which trials were active and expiring.”

Solution

Daniel shared the need for a tool that combines the team’s existing tech stack and offers full customer visibility. That’s why he was excited about Calixa’s large number of built-out integrations, which allowed easy plug-and-play on the platform.

“​​The thing that got us really excited to start using Calixa was the integration of BigQuery. Being able to have custom views in BigQuery and then leverage those in Calixa in combination with other data like Segment events and Intercom conversations allowed us to actually paint a full 360 view of our customers.”

“Calixa gives AEs and CSMs easy access to product insights in one place.”

By leveraging Calixa’s platform, Voiceflow’s GTM teams quickly saw benefits.

Contextual outreach to high priority customers

Daniel’s team leverages Calixa’s Journey View to conveniently bucket customers into key stages in the activation funnel. They can see who are activated users, collaborators, and advanced users. Meanwhile, AEs use Calixa’s intuitive PQL scoring to find active, qualified trials to go after. During customer-facing conversations, both teams now fully understand a customer’s product adoption and journey. 

“Scoring helps us prioritize outreach to make sure a) we’re spending time with customers who get the most value out of it and b) we are strategic during these conversations. We can see user actions and figure out how to advance them in the customer journey. Our conversation focuses on key features to help them.”

“With Calixa, you can easily understand a PQA score and then zoom into individual user behavior and PQL scores.”

Proactively manage account health

With Calixa, Voiceflow’s Success team can quickly understand account health and product usage. This helps them ensure Voiceflow has multiple core champions and power users within each of their accounts.

“Prior to Calixa, we had check-ins with every customer that was completely time-based. Now we're able to see who actually needs to be checked in with, instead of waiting a quarter to find out that they have an issue.”

Prior to Calixa, weekly workload looked like: 

  • 2 -4 hours to determine the (static) “product score” of top accounts
  • 1 -2 hours to find & report out inactive accounts

Now with Calixa, the team has an instant PQL view that scores active and inactive trials.

Impact

An increased book of business

Voiceflow CSMs were already managing several hundred accounts, but with Calixa they were able to further increase their book of business. Having a true view of account health helped confidently scale their Success motion.

1.6x increase in book of business

managed per CSM

A more efficient and relevant outreach

With Calixa, the Success team knows which customers need attention and the Sales team can find active trials to convert. They save hours of digging through data and are able to instead spend that time with customers.

150 hours of digging saved per month 

now spent on valuable customer conversations

Daniel says that the biggest change has been how their team approaches customers. They are able to talk about product usage and tie that back to customer goals.

“We now understand where the customer is getting value, what core features are being used, and who our champions are. All of this gives us a better chance to succeed.”

What’s next

There is a lot more Voiceflow has planned with Calixa! Daniel looks forward to enabling Sales and Success to automatically add users to Outreach via Calixa based on custom PQL triggers. This personalized sequencing further increases rep productivity. 

As Voiceflow continues to grow, Daniel is confident Calixa will keep his reps productive, data-driven, and ultimately successful.