How Atrium increased its Customer Success productivity with Census

Company Type Product-led Growth Team Customer Success Use Cases Health score, Product metrics in CRM Featured Integrations Amplitude, Redshift, Salesforce

Using the right tools can be ‘make it or break it’ for your customer success teams. High-quality software or services can provide detailed user insights to measure how likely a potential customer is to sign on, how happy they are while using your product, and can even help them solve problems before they arise.

For Atrium’s Pete Kazanjy, he had been looking for just the right customer success tool to help gauge customer satisfaction. What he wanted was something that was quick to integrate and simple to use, with lots of functionality.

What he found was Census, which was everything Pete was looking for with the added benefit of allowing him to improve both his customer success and sales teams, at the same time.

Here’s Pete’s journey using Census:

About Pete and Atrium

Pete co-founded Atrium in 2016, and currently leads their customer success and sales teams. “I hate the title CRO, but that’s essentially what it is that I do, so I’m responsible for marketing, I’m responsible for sales, I’m also responsible for customer success,” says Pete.

As a product, Atrium makes sales and performance software that continuously monitors KPI’s for sales teams, “It’s like an army of sales operations analysts in a box,” says Pete. “And it makes sales managers and sales operations people look amazing at what they do.”

Pete says Atrium is different because it allows users to automate and process their data in a streamlined way.

“Typically with analytics you need to prepare the data, know what questions you want to answer, get the data in a proper place, and then build a bunch of reporting. Then you have to come back and look at it,” Pete says. “Atrium automates all of that. So it's very, very easy. ”

Pete Before Census

Before Pete found Census, he explained that he had two main pain points.

First, he wanted a clearer understanding of user data at Atrium. In the past, Pete had used a custom-build tool at his last company, called ‘Batman.’ Pete likens Batman to a very, very basic Gainsight, a user monitoring tool that could help them begin to know what was going on from a customer success standpoint at Atrium.

“It was so clunky and limited, the Customer Success people hated it,” says Pete, “but it was better than not knowing what was going on from a success standpoint for our users.”

Pete’s team at Atrium had user data from Segment going into Redshift, and they were using Tableau on top of that, which gave them at least some understanding of what their users were doing, “but it was a very, very rudimentary understanding,” says Pete.

Pete’s second pain point was a little bit more elusive. Because of Atrium’s ease of use and simplicity, customers could often miss how effective it was for them.

“Most BI or analytics softwares are sold as a big initiative, but in our case, we can just slip in very easily,” says Pete. “Now the downside of that is that we want to prove that people are getting utility. We've also always wanted to have an easy way for sales to see which people are using Atrium successfully, for example, who is trending in the right direction, and who’s turning in the wrong direction.”

Pete Meet Boris

That’s where Atrium was at when Pete ran into Boris Jabes, Census’ CEO, at a conference in Silicon Valley.

When they started talking about Census, Pete said that he could immediately see the appeal for his customer success teams. “Since so many people at Atrium know how to do Salesforce reporting, I knew you could do all sorts of fun stuff with Census,” Pete says. “People could literally start building castles in the sky. And that's what we did.”

Right off the bat, Pete saw that one major advantage to working with Census was how easy it was going to be to start using it and integrating it into their current system.

“It's actually a pretty similar narrative to Atrium,” says Pete.

“The way that most organizations solve this problem is to do a huge implementation process. Census didn’t need all that.”

Other tools that Pete had worked with in the past that offered similar functionality, were extremely heavy to set up. While, “the other post-Segment, post-mParticle, post-Redshift class of CS tools are simpler than Gainsight, they’re still not super easy. And then they're all very feature limited,” says Pete.

"Since so many people at Atrium know how to do Salesforce reporting, I knew you could do all sorts of fun stuff with Census. People could literally start building castles in the sky. And that's what we did."

Peter Kazanjy, Co-founder & CRO

Census With Atrium’s Sales Team

After Pete saw the ease with which Census allowed Atrium to uplevel their Customer Success teams, he began looking for ways to apply it to other teams as well.

“Then we began using Census within our sales team as well, and for us, there have been several different use cases there.” For example, Pete says that they can use the information Census sends to Salesforce to help inform on whether or not new users are taking advantage of all of their features, or even sending alerts out if pilot users are disengaged.

This has helped their sales team stay on top of how each new user is experiencing and interacting with Atrium. It’s also given Atrium a big advantage, Pete says. “From a business impact standpoint, one thing that's extraordinarily important for our sales motion is that we can sell on prospect data and that’s a huge competitive differentiator.”

Today, Atrium has continued to integrate and iterate with Census, opening whole new avenues for them. “At this point, we're doing some super sophisticated stuff,” says Pete. “Data just flows from Census into our Salesforce, and it gets used all throughout, both our sales motion and then also our success motion as well, and then all throughout the organization.”

"From a business impact standpoint, one thing that's extraordinarily important for our sales motion is that we can sell on prospect data and that’s a huge competitive differentiator."

Peter Kazanjy, Co-founder & CRO

What Makes Census Different?

For Pete, many of the advantages he’s seen from using Census have come down to how easy it is to use, and how much it has allowed Atrium to do.

But he says, “The reason I am in so deep with Census right now is not because I did some big specifications beforehand. It’s because they make things very simple for people to prototype and to express their creativity, which incentives them to keep using and keep iterating with the product.”

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