We’re always looking for great stories about how our customers are transforming and getting smart with data. Today we sit down with Nekotia Jones, Director of Client Support at XOi Technologies, to hear about how customer intelligence is enhancing work at the company.
Tell us about XOi Technologies
Our company has been in business since 2009 and we have built a mobile app and matching web backend that help field service agents get information about the job they’re trying to do. Also, we help agents capture photos and videos of the work they’re currently doing so they can reference it later.
A field service agent is someone like an HVAC technician, for example, who might be preparing to fix a commercial AC unit - we can help inform their repair.
We provide the app that helps them communicate to their company and help them make sales. Think of us like a “FaceTime on steroids” for field service agents of any type.
Tell me more about your role at XOi Technologies
I’ve been here since January 2018 and I’m the director of our client support team. We provide day-to-day support to our customers and spend a lot of time evaluating other tools and products to better support our clients.
A big part of my role is finding and bringing tools to our company that will help us scale and do day-to-day business in a more efficient manner.
What problem(s) were you hired to help solve?
We had a customer success team - which was helping solve customer problems and providing support. We needed someone to help make the support team’s life easier and to provide structure to support them. I serve our end users and internal teams to learn from issues and enhance our product.
When did XOi bring Panoply into the operation and what was life like ‘before’?
We’ve had Panoply for four months now and it’s been a game changer for XOi. We can know what we need to know to make business decisions. Before Panoply, we had no single source of truth or any reporting/dashboards to share and visualize our data. Our decisions were anecdotal and custom for each customer. Now with Tableau and Panoply, we can score our customer health and make our customer interactions more targeted and applied.
Armed with data, we can help advise customers on how they can use XOi’s product to ultimately do their jobs better. As a result, we see higher sales and advanced customer loyalty. Because of the data in Panoply, we’re able to provide clarity to our sales internally and to our customers so we can take better actions.
With our Stitch Data integration and our native Panoply connectors, we have gone from not having any insights from data and now we can get more granular with the data we’re seeing. We’ve also found performance to be amazing, even during our busy times when data activity peaks.
What data sources do you have in your data stack?
For product data (in-app insights), we use MongoDB as well as Zendesk, Hubspot, Intercom, Delighted (NPS scoring). In fact, if we get any additional data about users and how they’re using our product, we’ll feed it into our data warehouse.
We’re able to build a complete and clear picture of how happy customers our with our product (thanks to Delighted data) - and can track the percent usage over time and we can call out unexpected and severe product utilization and trace those issues.
What were your requirements for your BI pipeline?
We wanted something secure, easy-to-use, robust and performant. Also, it was important for our solution to be easy for non-engineers to implement. In fact, we haven’t had to bother our engineering staff in setting up any portion of our data stack.
As a SaaS company, we’re constantly introducing new products internally for various reasons. Therefore, we wanted our BI tools to be able to adapt and ingest whatever data we generated.
When evaluating Stitch Data (a Panoply partner), we realized quickly that we needed a data warehouse. I looked at Google’s solution but realized it was complex to set up. Soon I discovered Panoply and loved the ease of use in getting a data warehouse in a matter of minutes.
What’s a ‘big win’ regarding how data enabled success at XOi?
Yes. Actually in a customer conversation recently about how they like our product. The customer said on a call that he was satisfied and everything was ‘fine’. However, our customer success person saw that adoption of our tool is down at this particular customer - and they were able to ask more questions about usage and discovered a churn risk using our customer scorecard.
Ultimately we were able to save the contract because of insights we had of how our customers were using XOi’s product.
What’s next for your data stack?
We're working to equip more people in our company with access to our data internally. Also, we’re going to start bringing in Salesforce data for another glimpse into our customer and prospect health.
Thanks for sitting down with us, Nekotia!
