How Cumul.io CEO Thomas De Clerck grew Cumul.io to $9.8M revenue with a 59 person team in 2024.

yeah so my name is Carl um founder and CEO at cumulio and for the last 15 years I've been living and breeding business intelligence I started my career mainly for larger corporates crunching numbers for years analyzing data for years up until the moment that I realized that I wanted to bring the power of data-driven decision making to all not just to business analysts but really to everybody and and moreover I wanted to bring those insights to the places where we're making the decisions so inside the applications where we're making these decisions and so around seven years ago I created a company called chimulio we're a building block for any web platform that wants to offer analytics and dashboards to their end customers so you can help them make better data-driven decisions I'm excited to be here to talk about some lessons learned along the way but also to share some of the research we've done with the comp finish um so let's see before I start one thing that I do want to get out of the way is when we're talking about customer analytics experience and or client-facing analytics I'm talking about you as SAS companies offering the data to your end users so that they can make better decisions it's not about analyzing your customers Behavior you know it's about giving the insight to your customers deserve so in this talk I'll talk about um why you should care as SAS Founders and what does it mean great customer analytics experience and for the ones looking to step up their game in client-facing analytics I've got you covered with what are the five levels of great customer analytics experience so let's first start with the why why should you even care why should you be interested um well allow me to start with the research done by McKinsey six years ago and they looked at a vast amount of companies from small to medium to large companies and they actually compared how companies were making decisions and they compared data-driven companies to normal companies and they actually figured out that no matter the size data-driven companies were 23 times more likely to attract new customers six times more likely to retain these customers and 19 times more likely um to be profitable and given that you're in SAS I gather you already use data to make decisions on on sales on marketing maybe on Personnel planning but um I can ask you this are you already giving that information to your customers are you already helping them to make these better decisions because like you they also look at to to some Assurance over the outcome of decisions that they're making like you they're looking for these decisions and have the biggest positive impact for their company and with you as a provider they look to you for assistance because you're the domain expert and and if you can help them not only are you helping them to win but you create a Competitive Edge for yourself and so what are some reasons that you should be looking into client facing analytics um I have three examples here one is on reach one is on retention and the other one is on cost savings first one it's a customer of ours uh Greenly it's carbon foot counting and by adding customer facing analytics they were able to attract a vast amount of new customers why well a pretty but also an accurate picture paints way more than a couple of words or a dumb Excel file and so by visually showing what they were doing with their platform on landing pages but also interactive interactive they were able to prove the value of what they doing second one is on retention and it's actually a very interesting case they started to implement client-facing analytics to prove the ROI of their platform to their customers so it's a video first customer engagement platform and what they did is and they compared the data when people were just starting to use their platform with the data after they were using their platform for a couple of weeks and then they came with clear Roi and so nobody will leave your platform if you prove that it makes sense using the platform and then lastly on cost savings um that's a client of ours in proptech and they drastically reduced the cost and the time um to support our customers why well before using customer facing analytics they had customer success and Engineering teams creating reports for their customers specific reports to help them optimize business operations building operations sorry um and by adding a way for their customers to slice and dice and to interact with the data they actually gave the possibility for their customers to immediately react and optimize their building operations um and so if you weren't convinced already before joining the talk I hope with these three reasons I can show you and it you shouldn't disregard a client-facing analytics it can bring you a great value but knowing why you should do it doesn't mean that we know how to do it well and so let's talk about um what is good customer analytics experience and maybe more importantly what it's not um how it can help you drive sticky Behavior to your product um and then um and and then what does it really make great customer analytics experience so let's start with what it's not although that there are great examples out there on average most SAS companies fail in doing client-facing analytics well and why is that well we to to look at that we actually did large scale research specifically focused on SAS companies so what we did is we looked at 250 of the top performing G2 top performing companies on G2 on the main categories and we looked at how their end users perceived the analytical analytical feature set and we actually found out that 89 of all these companies dealt with negative reviews and so why was that well the main reason 61 of all negative reviews indicated that it was too clunky to use they couldn't find their way in there second reason it didn't present the data that they needed to make the right decisions and then three they weren't able to configure or edit the reports to their likings um and when we actually started digging deeper we saw that most SAS companies look at client-facing analytics as necessary something you have to do to check a box a cost center but they all fail to see the huge potential and the benefits that can bring with it and those benefits can be immense they can very well be the difference between losing or winning against your competition think about Strava so back in the days there were many running and cycling apps how many winning cycling apps do you still know today Strava largely beat their competition through great customer analytics experience because if you do it right your customers will go to your platform because in a nice looking interface they'll have access to real time insights that help them make better decisions and they'll share these with their peers with their colleagues which brings in a community effect and if you allow them to dig deeper and to uncover new insights and maybe to create even their own reports you actively Empower them and all while you're educating them in your platform where you become the trusted partner the partner they depend on and then you're building a strong Innovative brand so in a nutshell where is great customer analytics to be found well it's in the intersection of these three areas of course end user business value it has to make sense but then you have personalization um and premium user experience so with that now that we know what great customer analytics experience or taxes let's look at how you can get there um there's actually five levels that we what we created these five levels it's based on research but also customer experiences um and you can go over them one by one but you can definitely also combine them or skip them to get quicker to the cax Walhalla and let's get with let's start with the first one and this is really about getting the basics right so you look at the data you already have a tent and you look at what metrics what charts or dashboards would matter to your end customers for them to make informed decisions and and at this stage you only look at your entire customer base so you don't look at their specific context um great example here is it's from one of our government clients um typically what they do is they share on fertility rates um so it's about bird Birds numbers but here they looked at how can we matter to our end users which are the Belgian civilians um and they created a tool which was based on popularity of baby names and that allowed people to parents to look at a name that would be popular enough so that everybody would like the name but not so popular for example being in the top five that you would risk having your kid in a class where three or more would share the same name so really bring in value for their end users once we have step one let's move to step two and then here we're really going to customer specific here we're making sure that our customers feel special so the charts and dashboards that you'll be creating are specific to the data that that user is looking at um and so you want to make sure that it's secure so that the people only with the right authorizations have access to it um but how do you start with this well a good way in starting in it is you're the domain expert so you know what the important decisions in your industries are that need to be made and also the metrics that influence that so start with these metrics and gradually add data as you go user testing here is crucial because you'll want to build these dashboard templates that actually help your customers so throw away metrics if you see that there aren't used and make sure that you're not cluttering any dashboards it needs to be easy to consume easy to play with it doesn't need all the data just make sure that it contains the data that actually matters to them so an example here it's a broker report on a portfolio...