Totango

What is Totango

Totango is a customer success platform designed for businesses, especially SaaS companies, to manage and grow their customer base. The main purpose of the software is to help customer success teams understand customer health, reduce churn, and identify opportunities for expansion. It works by collecting customer data from different sources, analyzing it to create health scores, and enabling teams to automate actions based on customer behavior. Totango was founded in 2010. The company provides a suite of tools that allow businesses to design, run, and measure their customer journey from onboarding to renewal. Its headquarters are in Redwood City, California, with a global presence.

Totango Features

Totango offers a range of features to help manage the customer lifecycle effectively.

• Customer 360: This feature combines data from various systems like CRM, support tickets, and product usage to create a single, complete view of each customer. This helps teams understand customer health and history at a glance.
• Health Scores: You can configure health scores based on multiple metrics. These scores are dynamic and help teams prioritize which customers need attention to prevent churn.
• SuccessPlays: These are automated or manual workflows that guide customer success managers on the next best action. For example, a playbook can be triggered when a customer's health score drops, assigning tasks to the team.
• Campaigns: This feature allows you to send targeted, automated email campaigns to customer segments. It is useful for onboarding new users, announcing features, or collecting feedback.
• Segmentation: Users can create dynamic segments of customers based on any data point, such as health score, contract value, or product usage. This allows for more personalized engagement.
• Reporting and Dashboards: Totango provides customizable dashboards and reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs) like churn rate, net revenue retention (NRR), and customer satisfaction.
• Unison AI: This is Totango's artificial intelligence layer. It helps predict churn, identify expansion opportunities, and provides insights to augment the team's efforts.

Totango Pricing Plans

Totango offers several pricing tiers to fit different business sizes and needs.

• Starter Plan: This plan is designed for small teams or startups just beginning to build their customer success program. It typically includes core features like customer health scoring and basic automation for a limited number of users and accounts.
• Growth Plan: Aimed at growing businesses, this plan offers more advanced features, increased capacity, and more customization options. It usually includes more integrations, advanced reporting, and support for larger teams.
• Enterprise Plan: This is the most comprehensive plan for large organizations. It includes all features, premium support, advanced security, and unlimited scalability. The plan is fully customizable to meet the complex needs of enterprise-level companies.

Totango Free Plan

Totango offers a free plan that is a good starting point for small businesses. The free plan typically includes access to core customer success features for a limited number of users and customer accounts. You can use it to track customer health, manage tasks, and get a basic view of your customer base. While it has limitations on the volume of data and number of integrations compared to paid plans, it is a functional tool for getting started with customer success management without any cost.

How to use Totango

Getting started with Totango involves a few key steps to set up and manage your customer success operations.

1. Integrate Your Data: The first step is to connect Totango to your existing tools. This includes your CRM (like Salesforce), helpdesk software (like Zendesk), and your own product's usage data. This creates the foundation for the Customer 360 view.
2. Define Health Profiles: Configure customer health scores based on what success means for your customers. You can use metrics like product adoption, support tickets, survey responses, and contract value.
3. Create Customer Segments: Group your customers into logical segments. For example, you can segment by plan type, industry, or health score. This allows you to create targeted strategies for each group.
4. Build SuccessPlays: Design automated playbooks to standardize your team's response to customer signals. For instance, create a playbook for onboarding new customers or an at-risk playbook for customers with low health scores.
5. Monitor and Engage: Use the dashboards to monitor customer health and team performance. Your team can then use the insights and assigned tasks from SuccessPlays to engage with customers proactively.

Pros and Cons of Totango

Pros:

• Scalability: The platform is built to grow with your business, from a small startup to a large enterprise.
• Powerful Automation: The SuccessPlays feature allows for deep automation of workflows, which increases team efficiency.
• Comprehensive Customer View: The Customer 360 feature provides a unified view of all customer data, which is very valuable for CS teams.
• Free Plan Available: The availability of a functional free tier makes it accessible for companies with small budgets.

Cons:

• Learning Curve: The platform is powerful and has many features, which can be complex for new users to learn.
• Implementation Time: Setting up all the integrations and configuring the platform correctly can take significant time and resources, especially for larger companies.
• User Interface: Some users find the user interface to be less modern or intuitive compared to some newer competitors in the market.

Totango integrations

Totango integrates with a wide variety of business applications to centralize customer data. Connecting these tools allows for a more complete picture of the customer journey.

• Salesforce Integration: Syncs account, contact, and opportunity data from Salesforce to Totango, providing CS teams with full context on sales history and customer relationships.
• Zendesk Integration: Brings support ticket data into Totango, allowing you to measure customer satisfaction and include support metrics in health scores.
• HubSpot Integration: Connects marketing and sales data from HubSpot, giving insight into the entire customer lifecycle from lead to loyal customer.
• Jira Integration: Allows for collaboration between customer success and product/engineering teams by linking customer feedback and issues to development tasks.
• Slack Integration: Sends real-time alerts and notifications from Totango to Slack channels, enabling teams to respond quickly to important customer events.
• Stripe Integration: Pulls in subscription and billing information, which is critical for calculating financial health and identifying renewal dates.

Totango Alternatives

• Gainsight: A leading competitor often considered the enterprise standard. Gainsight is known for its very powerful and extensive feature set, but it is also one of the more complex and expensive solutions, suited for mature CS organizations.
• ChurnZero: Focuses heavily on real-time product usage data and automation. ChurnZero is praised for its user-friendly interface and its ability to help CS teams be more proactive with in-app communication and personalized journeys.
• ClientSuccess: A simpler, more streamlined platform that focuses on the core needs of a customer success manager. It is known for being easy to use and implement, making it a good choice for teams that need a straightforward solution without extensive complexity.
• Catalyst: Now part of Totango, Catalyst was known for its modern design and strong focus on integrating with tools like Slack to bring CS into the daily workflow. Its features are being integrated into the main Totango platform.

Totango API

Yes, Totango provides a developer API that allows you to build custom integrations and interact with your customer data programmatically. The API can be used to push data into Totango from any system, trigger events, or extract data for custom reports. To use the API, you need to generate an API key. This key is typically found in the settings or integration section of your Totango account for users with administrative privileges. The API is a RESTful API that uses standard HTTP methods.

Here is a simple example of how to send an event to the Totango API using cURL:

curl -X POST -H 'Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
  "event": "Module Completed",
  "account_id": "ACC-12345",
  "user_id": "user@example.com",
  "module": "Onboarding Tutorial"
}' \
'https://api.totango.com/v1/events/track'

Totango Affiliate program

Totango does not have a public-facing affiliate program where individuals can sign up to earn commissions for referrals. Instead, they offer a Partner Program for technology companies, consulting firms, and service providers. This program is designed for businesses that want to build integrations with Totango or offer implementation and consulting services to their clients. If you are interested in becoming a partner, you should contact their partnership team directly through their website to discuss potential collaboration opportunities.