How To Build Data Foundations For Digital Success

Clean, connected data rarely claims headlines, yet it fuels every high-performing Customer Success motion. During our recent CS Angel pay it forward webinar three field veterans, Holly Goodliffe (Digital Transformation Consultant), Wayne McCulloch (Chief Customer Officer at Alkami and author of The Seven Pillars of Customer Success), and Hudson Lofchie (Co-Founder of Greyspace Consulting), shared stories that turn theory into revenue. Here's the recap on what we learned. If you are a visual learner, you can scroll down to watch the full session on YouTube.

Holly Goodliffe (Digital Transformation Consultant), Wayne McCulloch (CCO, Alkami, Author, The Seven Pillars of Customer Success) and Hudson Lofchie (Co-Founder, Greyspace Consulting) left to right

1. Data hygiene sets momentum

Early minutes focused on a simple truth: teams thrive once every metric carries a single definition. Holly recalled a fintech client that tracked eight versions of “active user.” A three-week taxonomy sprint produced one field, one owner, and one refresh cadence. Weekly reviews shrank from sixty minutes to thirty because decision makers trusted the numbers. Her summary line still rings in my head: “Governance feels like plumbing; every journey relies on it.”

Key habits emerged:

• Publish a dictionary that assigns a steward to each field.

• Confirm accuracy before dashboards refresh.

• Provide self-serve access so anyone can explore trends without ticket queues.
  

2. Insight matters only when action follow

Dashboards earn their keep only when they trigger real customer moves, a gap Wayne McCulloch calls the “last mile.” His play: health indicators live inside Salesforce, fire a Slack alert when status changes, and open a playbook with next steps. RevOps owns the math, Product streams usage, Success drives outreach, and an action council reviews progress each week. He boiled the most common gaps down to four:

• Insights parked in dashboards: Move them into workflows and tie each one to a trigger.

• Frontline doubts the data: Surface metrics inside the tools they already use and explain how each number forms.

• No clear owner: Assign joint stewardship across CS, RevOps, and Product so follow-through never stalls.

• Siloed numbers, no shared plan: Run cross-functional action councils that choose the next best action together.
  

His guiding line: “Confidence rises with clean data; revenue rises when every signal sparks a step.”

A cautionary tale proved the point. Adoption inside one enterprise spiked, dashboards glowed green, and celebration followed. Two weeks later a termination letter arrived. The champion had left, a new team spent hours reverse-engineering workflows, and the usage burst masked confusion. Once stakeholder fields joined the health formula, early warnings surfaced a full month sooner.

3. Storytelling turns statistics into urgency

Hudson prefers narrative for alignment. At Bird, the electric-scooter company where he joined as one of the first fifty employees, support agents pitched ideas during an internal “Shark Tank.” In one round, an agent spotted a four-dollar support cost tied to a two-dollar ride. He wrote a simple keyboard script that pulled those tickets, checked ride value, issued refunds through the Bird API, and closed the cases. Customer happiness jumped and monthly savings hit roughly two hundred thousand dollars. Leadership approved a full automation sprint on the spot because the pilot arrived with a clear revenue headline. Hudson’s takeaway: prototype with whatever tools you have, track the lift in dollars, share the story, and watch resources follow.

4. Revenue unifies language

Metrics gain traction when finance can trace them to pipeline health or renewal protection. Holly offered a high-ratio model: one CSM guiding seven-hundred accounts. Triggers fire when usage dips or a champion email bounces. A digital prompt invites the right contact to a live session, and the sequence lifted the firm’s ten-point health score by 1.2. Finance labelled that shift “millions preserved” and expanded headcount within days. Wayne added that predictable cash flow reduces meeting volume more effectively than any calendar tip.

5. Reliable plumbing powers agentic AI

Large-language agents drew excitement from every speaker. Holly views them as inevitable once schemas stay disciplined. Ambiguous fields starve autonomous workflows; clear labels act as rocket fuel. Teams that invest today in tidy inputs will unlock compound gains when agentic solutions mature.

Real-world reminders that keep teams humble

Quiet ticket queues

A SaaS firm applauded shrinking support volume until renewal season revealed silent frustration. Fewer tickets signaled disengagement rather than health. Success rebuilt contact-reason lists and now audits “other” categories each quarter, surfacing product gaps early.

On Individual Influence – Invitation to Tinker

Hudson’s call to every IC is simple: be the tinkerer. Pull the raw data by hand, stitch a quick report in Sheets, or craft a keyboard script that fixes a single pain point. Log the lift (time saved, dollars protected, customers kept) hen walk a data-engineering friend through the steps over coffee. Pair on one tiny mapping cleanup and celebrate the result in Slack. That shared win earns you a seat when bigger data resources get allocated.

Tinkerer starter kit

• Identify one metric that feels fuzzy or slow.

• Hand-build a report and act on the insight for two weeks.

• Capture the impact in hard numbers.

• Demo the workflow to RevOps or your data partner and refine together.

• Publish the before/after story and credit every collaborator.
  

Concrete proof, public praise, and a repeatable workflow move priorities faster than org charts ever will.

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