Measuring Business, One Dashboard at a Time

The Challenge

Zendesk is a scale business with over 10,000 customers and thousands of product trials each month. Like all web-based businesses, they are swimming in data about their business. But making sense of it all—and gleaning real business insight—is a huge challenge. The tangled web of data does not automatically translate into CAC, MRR, Conversion Rate and CLV. Ultimately, Zendesk wants to:

• Make transactional data analyzable, readable and digestible by normal human beings
• Create multiple ways to view the data on a granular level to understand the lifecycle of their users
• Share customer metrics throughout the company
• Implement agility—start simple and build from the findings

The Solution

GoodData’s Subscription Analytics brought Zendesk’s subscriber and usage data to life. After a six-week implementation, Zendesk had its first set of revenue and subscriber dashboards, which reinforced long-held assumptions about the business and uncovered a few surprises about customer behavior.

• Dashboards that measure the entire business: revenues, customers, trials, wins, top accounts
• All metrics trended historically to show health of the business over time
• Key processes modeled, including trial-to-conversion, upsells and churn
• Separate role-based views of Zendesk business metrics for the executive team, Board of Directors, and front-line employees.
• Ad hoc analysis lets employees dig in way beyond the summary dashboards.

Peeling the Onion

Zendesk grew so fast that they had a hard time making sense of their basic business data. Task number one was to gather the relevant data—subscriber data, product usage, website performance and support interactions—into a data warehouse that would provide an analytical view of the business. The data warehouse opened the floodgates to analysis. Now analysts could dive into the numbers and start to make more sense of the business; everything was trending up, but now Zendesk could discover why and how to scale faster. Key questions—like the impact of pricing changes or how the trial-to-conversion process changed over time—could suddenly be answered in minutes, not months.

Seeing is Believing

Understanding any subscription-based business goes beyond just measuring churn and renewal rates. The success in determining customer behavior is analyzing a combination of subscription metrics with product usage, market data, and pricing plans. Zendesk went well beyond the basics and created interactive dashboards that mapped the entire customer lifecycle, from when a prospect lands on Zendesk’s public website, through trial, conversion, usage, upsell and beyond. Dashboards aren’t just for the analysts; at Zendesk, front-line employees get to see the key business metrics, executives run the business on the metrics and the board views summary metrics to gauge overall company health—everyone has their own view of the same set of metrics.

Digging Deep into the Metrics

Zendesk’s agile approach to business metrics enabled them to go from concept-to-dashboards in 6 weeks, including creating a data warehouse of key business data. Dashboards now change on a weekly basis, incorporating more data, more metrics, and different views on the business. Alex Gurevich, Zendesk’s director of business analytics, can run cohort analysis on trial conversions over time, the financial team can track monthly recurring revenue by customer and plan, and the support group can see how it is doing against service level goals. Adrian McDermott, VP Engineering, puts it best: “We want to make these business metrics ubiquitous. Giving the team more and more access to our business data leads to better, smarter and faster decisions about how to grow our business.”