I’d call this a hot take, but hopefully at this point it is obvious — everyone on your team should know what makes a good customer and why. This knowledge shouldn't be exclusive to product managers and marketers who build “buyer” and “user” personas. Nor should it be exclusive to execs and upper management. Everyone from your IC support person to engineer to content creator should be able to identify who they are.
And while we’re seeing a growing fixation on AI-backed software and have become utterly obsessed with automation, the truth is that this level of wisdom about a customer cannot be solved with technology. This can only be solved by having a strong team who has open conversations and challenges each other to dig deeper into your customers’ needs. And it is strengthened through the continual iterations you make as a team, which fosters alignment and improves that discerning eye required by everyone to move the business forward.
Why is this so important for everyone to own?
Because when everyone in your company understands what makes for a good customer, everyone becomes a master of prioritization. And when everyone understands what to prioritize, internal conversations improve as well as the outcomes. (Plus, I'm convinced everyone sleeps better in this scenario which is an added bonus).
When people know what makes a good customer, they'll know what to look for in the data. They’ll know what deserves their attention. This killer sense of prioritization is the difference between putting your team on a high-speed train moving forward vs. putting them on a merry-go-round that’s bound to nowhere (making everyone nauseous in the process).
This notion of company-wide customer ownership is why we built Pano. It’s not just about building a tool showing you a bunch of side-by-side data for the sake of giving you "more". We wanted to build something that actually helps everyone understand what to look for and when to act. Whether you’re a CEO looking for a quick rundown for a high-paying customer or you’re answering a support ticket and want greater context on an issue — Pano gives you the whole picture. Pano unlocks the prioritization key for your entire company.
So instead of focusing on one team, we want to show you how Pano helps everyone in your company be better:
Customer Success
Let’s start with the leading folks who uses Pano. Customer Success Managers and their teams are constantly squeezed between revenue, product, marketing, and support teams. They’re responsible for knowing everything about a customer’s journey and for making sure they keep coming back. That’s a mighty request!
Using a bulky, expensive CS software platform with a bombardment of data is clearly not helping. We’ve spoken to quite a few folks who are unhappy with other CS tools because of how buried they are in data that isn’t actionable (or even correct…. yikes!)
Pano helps CS teams by providing a very simple view into a customer. We integrate with all your existing platforms and surface the most relevant information so you can act quickly.
How do we know what's relevant? Well, we start with the big and obvious hitters. You can view upcoming renewal dates, product activity, health scores, and revenue.
Want a little more? We also show you who has spoken to that customer, upcoming meetings, and interactions — all in a clean and flexible snapshot. It's that sweet spot between specificity and simplicity, giving you enough information to act on without adding a sea of data you have to wade through.
Product and Engineering
This team often gets the most limiting view of customer activity which is honestly bonkers to me. Unless there is a major issue or there’s some request from “above,” product and engineering teams rarely get a full view of a customer. Sure, they can see feature usage and requests, but what about additional context?
With Pano, product teams can easily search for a customer and look at not only their product usage, but also see that alongside what support tickets have been submitted, or who the owner on the account is, or even when there is an upcoming call with a colleague. Product teams typically don't have access to all of these tools due to expensive licenses. But with Pano, these teams have greater visibility and context without all the added seats.
Marketing
Another team often omitted from the customer success discussion is marketing. Of course not everyone can be involved in every meeting — too many chefs in the kitchen and all that. But marketing teams are often burdened with having to go to CS teams to find customers they can interview or research for marketing content and GTM strategies. Or they're slipped a sales enablement assignment under the door with little to no context.
When it comes to writing case studies, fine-tuning buyer personas, or even finding areas where content can supplement the CS journey, Pano helps this team find real customers who they can reach out to. Marketing may not need logins to your customer support, success, and revenue tools, but they surely would benefit from seeing the full picture.
Customer Service and Support
My heart goes out to support teams. I mean they really are the underdogs of the bunch. They have to know just about everything that goes on with the product and rarely ever encounter a happy customer unless they made it so. But don’t worry, we’ve got something for support teams as well.
Pano allows these teams to quickly access additional context of a customer without ever having to leave your chosen support tool. You can be in Zendesk or Intercom and with the Pano extension, you can easily highlight a customer’s name or email and quickly pull up revenue info, product activity, who else they’ve spoken to on your team, etc. You have more information to get to the heart of their frustration faster.
CEO and C-Suite
Last but not least, our C-Suite. If you are in this role, you are particularly prone to being annoyed at logging into different platforms to find customer information. Mainly because you don’t spend as much time in them like the rest of us. And you really shouldn’t be anyway. So when you do need to find a customer’s information, hunting down your login info and passwords and asking what is stored where can be infuriating. This fire of frustration is actually why we built Pano.
Earlier this year, we were approached by a friend who is a CEO of a 200+ employee SaaS business. He mentioned how difficult it is to find complete information about a customer when they are disgruntled and hunt him down through a LinkedIn message. Is this angry customer worth my time?
Finding the answer to that question became incredibly difficult to answer as different data about that customer lived in different systems — a few of which this CEO doesn’t frequently access so finding login info was a pain.
With Pano, he is now able to log into one place and view a quick snapshot of a customer. Pano pulls in data from Stripe, Salesforce, Zendesk, Pendo, Google Mail and Google Calendar to help him see everything he needs to when referencing a customer who’s been escalated to his level of response. He can also see who in his company has interacted with a customer for a quick touchpoint on context.
There are probably more teams I’m missing, and I’d be happy to add later! But for now, the point I’m trying to make is that Pano helps everyone in your company better understand your customers, and quickly. You can get a quick snapshot of someone in seconds and have more informed conversations with your colleagues about how to improve their experience — all of which fuel better internal alignment and happier customers.
