Alteryx Customer Success Finds Digital Scale and Efficiency

Data science company Alteryx was growing rapidly, and their Customer Success team had grown with it. But while customers with high annual recurring revenue (ARR) had stellar retention and sentiment, their lower-ARR customers needed more attention. To help these customers and drive scale and efficiency across the board, Alteryx built a Digital Customer Success model that complemented the human touch efforts of customer success managers (CSMs) with an automated digital core—in just nine months.

Software subscription company Alteryx delivers end-to-end automation of data engineering, analytics, reporting, machine learning, and data science processes. The company has grown rapidly in recent years and now serves a global customer base of more than 8,000 enterprise organizations. 

During this period of growth, Alteryx established highly effective high-touch customer success capabilities. Their high-ARR customers were thriving, with high retention rates and NPS results. The Customer Success team achieved these results by delivering excellent end-to-end service, going the extra mile to help these important customers find value. 

But for customers with lower ARR, that level of attention was not feasible. The long tail of lower-paying customers weren’t getting as much attention from Customer Success, and it showed in their metrics—they had lower retention, lower NPS, and lower advocacy. 

To replicate their value-delivering methods with lower-revenue customers, Alteryx leveraged Gainsight to develop and implement a hybrid Digital Customer Success model.

To build their Digital Customer Success program, Alteryx began with best practices they had developed with their high-touch CSMs. Using these human-led motions as a blueprint, they employed Gainsight data and automation to roll them out digitally to lower-ARR customers.

“Taking a human-first approach to the development of our digital success experiences was essential.”
– Luke Minors, Customer Success Leader at Alteryx. 

Using Gainsight, Alteryx developed an automated event trigger program that delivers success plans to customers that exhibit certain behaviors. This program performed as well as their human-led trigger program, but allows them to cover all customers, including auto-renewal customers that have limited interaction with human-led initiatives.

Alteryx uses email as their primary engagement methodology, so they have leaned heavily on Gainsight Playbooks and Journey Orchestrator to build repeatable frameworks. Their longest standing program has been End User Onboarding, which has delivered communications to over 50,000 end users across more than 3000 accounts since its release in July 2022.

Even though their Digital Customer Success program was originally intended primarily for lower-ARR customers, Alteryx soon realized they could apply the model across their customer base. In just nine months of using Gainsight, automation has become the backbone of the Customer Success function, enabling them to reach new heights of scale and efficiency.

“Gainsight allowed us to collect feedback and optimize for where CSMs spend their time, and subsequently increase our CSM to Account ratio 4X within a year,” says Minor. 

The results are already showing up in the data. Alteryx compared customers in the Digital Customer Success program versus a control group, and found that customers in digital spent more days in product after activation, had fewer deactivations, and increased their utilization, across customer types. 

“Blending human-led and digital customer success has improved our business performance by increasing revenue, decreasing customer acquisition cost, and increasing customer lifetime value,” says Matthew Stauble, Chief Customer Officer at Alteryx. “These results would not be possible without Gainsight.”