Building for company-wide customer success

From an all-new Automation Station and enhanced email tracking capabilities, to our new best-in-class Pendo integration, Planhat’s latest improvements empower your entire organization to drive customer success.

It's 2023 and your customers are more important than ever. We see customer success as a company-wide effort and so do our users: that’s why over 30% of them are outside traditional "CS"-roles. They’re Product Managers and Marketers, Support and Operations teams, and Legal and Finance departments, illustrating just how much of a team effort it is to make customers successful. Planhat provides them with a unified 360-degree view of their customers and customer interactions, enabling smooth collaboration from onboarding to enablement, support, and even managing and marketing product releases.

This is the world we've been building towards since day 1: delivering flexible and connected tools that your entire company can collaborate on to drive proactive, data-driven workflows. That’s why we’re focused on delivering across two core product pillars:

1. Running and automating cross-functional workflows: how smooth can the customer experience get when all your processes are run under one roof?

2. Turning data to action: everyone’s overflowing with customer data, but how can you actually extract value from it?

With these in mind, here’s a look at six hot-off-the-press releases that we’re particularly excited to share with you as we set our sights on the year ahead…

Streamline your Workflows

The all-new Automation Station

We believe that the more Planhat can automate your data and workflows for you, the more time you can spend on high-impact actions. With that mindset, we’ve engineered Planhat’s automations to be as configurable and far-reaching as possible. So much so, in fact, that sometimes our customers aren’t quite sure where to begin.

Our new Automation Station is designed to answer exactly that need, no matter whether you serve 100 or 100,000 customers through Planhat. In particular you’ll now be able to:

1. Access an ever-increasing library of curated automations for every use case: leverage intelligent search, or begin with our “Getting Started” collection, to discover our clean and intuitive complete-the-sentence automation templates

2. Keep visibility, with search and folder-based grouped view: never lose sight of your active automations, with filterable search functionality, a structured folder view and rules-based filters

3. Deploy sophisticated applets in a matter of clicks: run advanced functions like rolling fields up and down your org structure, mapping stakeholders through user auto-tagging, and automatically assigning CSM portfolios, with nothing more than a short sentence-completion

   
   

This promising release is just the first step towards plug-and-play automations capable of enabling teams of any size to unlock truly unlimited customer success. Looking ahead to 2023, we intend to build on this foundation with: a rich selection of Applets to streamline your data and supercharge your workflows; improved replacement codes, with a focus on usability; automatic tagging and titling of automations; and conditional branching, allowing your automations to run entire decision flows.

Next-generation text editor

While they too often fade into the background, text editors are the unsung heroes of CRMs and customer platforms. They’re both the most used feature across any app, and the most easily overlooked. As part of our mission to streamline every piece of your workflows, our updated text editor unlocks a multitude of elements with a simple ‘/’, enabling much more flexibility when logging information in Tasks, Conversations and any other Rich Text field across Planhat.

One of the major improvements we’ve made is with our replacement codes. Previously, these were a complex mix of numbers and letters that could be difficult to remember and use correctly. Now, they have been simplified and organized in an intuitive way, making it easier for users to utilize them in their automations. This includes the ability to add custom fields from Planhat or any connected integrations.

Additionally, automatic tagging and titling of automations has been implemented within the text editor. By simply adding a hashtag followed by a keyword, you can easily categorize your automation for better organization and tracking. This also helps in identifying which automations are related to specific workflows or campaigns.

But perhaps one of the most exciting features is the introduction of conditional branching

Soon, the new editor will also be available in Text Box widgets in Customer Intelligence: the first step towards Planhat’s exciting new Document Mode.

Email Tracking & Sequencing

Emailing with your customers is essential in any type of business, from product marketing to enablement delivery, invoicing and contracting, and - of course - customer support and service.

Email sequencing from Planhat is completely integrated with both your data platform (all your filters, health scores and metrics) and your other workflows (covering everything from projects to NPS and renewal management). With our latest email sequencing improvements, you can now track email engagement: opens, link click rates, and reply rates, and analyse them like any other datapoint across the platform - whether you’re evaluating how different outreach strategies perform, or using engagement as an indicator of customer health.

Certainly, this means less manual data transfer back and forth between marketing automation tools and your customer platform. But, most importantly, it means customer communication that is completely aligned both across your organization and with your customers’ lifecycle.

Heading into Q2, we’re excited to enable email sequencing conditional on these engagement metrics, with paths like “if the signup link was clicked, but they didn’t sign up, follow up personally; but if they didn’t click at all, send them another reminder email”. In doing so, we’re embedding the power of email automation deeper into your customer workflows, further reducing the gap between data and targeted, timely action.

Action on Data

Your daily digest

Your actions have the greatest impact when they’re motivated by the right information, at exactly the right time. That’s why, every morning, around the world, tens of thousands of customer-facing team members receive an email from Planhat summarising their key actions and priorities for the day ahead.

To ensure these notifications are as actionable as possible, we’ve included better deep links to Planhat updates, an improved structure, and more context on the previews that matter most. In short: they’re serving your day up on a silver platter, ready to drive success.

Grouped View

Planhat is, first and foremost, a data platform simple enough to sit in the hands of business users. That’s why our filters can perform complex cross-system queries and drive platform-wide workflows, with completely no code.

But just as important as your query itself, is how you can structure the data you see.

Let’s say you’re looking at all your Enterprise customers, or perhaps even Tickets raised by contacts marked as Decision-makers, who have an NPS > 6. Rows of sorted values only reveal part of the story, and leave us asking questions like “how many of my customers are in each phase?” or “which of these tickets are tagged as Critical?”.

That’s where our new Grouped View comes in: a smart way to sort your data, while splitting it by a property.

Looking ahead, we’re excited about the potential of Grouped View to answer questions like: “how much customer ARR is linked to this Product Sprint?”, via summary analytics per group; or “how are my projects split across Company health?”, through cross-object grouping. Grouped view will enable business users to analyse and act on their data quicker than ever.

Our New Pendo Integration

Understanding product adoption, engagement and customer sentiment are crucial to ensure everything your organization does is built around your customer. For this reason, usage data is the most important data type there is. We’ve partnered with Pendo so you can realize its fullest potential, in the easiest way possible, with Planhat.

Our new Pendo integration is both the most advanced and most user-friendly Pendo integration ever built. Here’s what you can now do in Planhat, that you won’t be able to do anywhere else:

• Keep a close eye on your end users: auto-create new end users with their name and email, as soon as they’re discovered as users in Pendo

• Analyse usage by application: split each metric by application, to compare instantly across your product suite

• Track product engagement: sync Pendo’s legendary Product Engagement Score, driving action directly from your products’ growth, stickiness and adoption

• Bring in any numeric datapoint: receive custom-calculated pipelines of any numeric datatype, as well as tailored reports and individual features and pages

Just head over to Integrations in Planhat to set up the connection in a matter of minutes.

Building for Scale

Practically, we believe Planhat should perform just as smoothly for an organization with thousands of customers and billions of datapoints, as it does for an organization with a handful. As more organizations choose Planhat as their customer platform, and bring in more of their teams’ data and workflows, platform usability, reliability and performance become paramount. Recently, we’ve taken two major steps towards this vision by:

• Rolling out an entirely new Analytics Architecture, meaning charts which used to require up to 2 minutes to load will be rendered in just 3 seconds, and full metric rebuilds lasting up to 5 hours can be completed in less than 20 minutes. This drastically improves our overall analytics reliability, and completely eliminates latency for our largest customers

• Upgrading our entire frontend framework to Vue 3, ensuring every Planhat page loads seamlessly and efficiently

• Launching proactive alerts informing you when you need to re-connect your Calendar or Email sync, driving improved integration visibility

Additionally, we’re always improving our integration library. Alongside our new Pendo integration, we recently updated our Slack integration, making it easier than ever to connect and receive notifications from Slack, and enhanced our Salesforce integration, enabling it to receive field updates triggered by automatic processes.

Embracing collaboration

Above all, these features and improvements are a sign of the promising year ahead, as we welcome evermore non-CS users into Planhat at scale.

In doing so, we remain resolutely focused on both our key pillars: ensuring your data is never far from a value-creating action; and that your cross-functional workflows harmonise into a seamless customer experience.

Ultimately, we hope each update we make empowers you along the way.