Episode description

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Allison Metcalfe, VP of Customer Success at LiveRamp, to discuss “Cohort Analysis for Customer Success.” LiveRamp is a marketing data company that unifies customer data across disparate sources. Large brands use LiveRamp’s identify resolution capabilities to drive true omnichannel marketing at new levels of accuracy and efficacy. At LiveRamp, as well as in previous roles, Allison has explored the full spectrum of analyses a customer success leader can use to track the health of a customer base to increase retention, upsells, referrals, and healthy customer-product engagement overall. Today, she joins us to discuss the importance of cohort analysis as it applies to the customer success function.

Cohort analysis is a quantitative exercise that companies can use to understand how metrics trends differ between various comparable groupings. It can be used across various functions within an organization, such as sales and finance. Sales analysts, for example, commonly use a form of cohort analysis to measure close rates (or other conversion rates through the sales funnel) and sales cycles (time-to-close). By breaking up deals into groups or “cohorts” consisting of the opportunities created in a particular month, we can see how the effectiveness of our sales team is changing over time. Cohort analysis is equally critical for customer success: not only for proper measurement of churn, but also for other customer health metrics. We’ll learn how Allison has used cohort analysis and similar exercise to optimize CS performance at LiveRamp, and how any startup stakeholder can do the same.

Allison Metcalfe is the VP of Customer Success at LiveRamp, where she has worked over over 3 years. LiveRamp is based in San Francisco and employs over 300 FTEs. The company is a subsidiary of Acxiom, which acquired the business in 2014 for a reported $310MM. Prior to that, she served as the Senior Director of Customer Success at Demandbase, where she spent two years. She also brings experience from earlier customer success roles at Jigsaw (now Data.com, acquired by SalesForce) and Equilar. She also serves as a customer success advisor to Entelo. Allison holds a BA from the University of St. Thomas.