Measuring B2B Customer Satisfaction: How Dashlane Leverages a Unique, Data-Driven Approach

Originally published:February 16, 2023|Last updated:March 26, 2024|Dashlane

Co-written by Tangi Gouez, Dashlane Product Data Analyst, and Manuel Cellier, Associate Product Data Analyst

At Dashlane, we believe each of us should feel connected to the end user, regardless of our roles and level of daily customer interaction. To ensure this, one of Dashlane’s core objectives is customer satisfaction. Due to our French roots, we call this “Amour du Client,” meaning “love of the customer.”

There are many ways in which we live and breathe this objective, and some of us on the Product Analytics team wanted to share a recent example.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why in 2022, the Product Analytics team wanted a better way to measure Amour du Client. We wanted a data-driven framework to help us monitor and understand how satisfied and engaged our customers are from the moment they first become aware of Dashlane to the moment they renew or upgrade.

After much discussion, we decided that measuring Amour du Client must:

Be tailored to Dashlane customers
Occur frequently
Provide actionable insights

Methods we considered for measuring customer satisfaction

We started this project by evaluating several metrics often used to measure customer satisfaction:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS consists of a single survey question: what is the likelihood that you’d recommend a specific company, product, or service to a friend or colleague? However, NPS doesn’t predict retention or customer satisfaction. It doesn’t ask if you’d be interested in buying the same product yourself or if you’re happy with your purchase.
The Customer Effort Score (CES): This score measures how much effort it takes customers to use the product. Although CES is more actionable than NPS, it doesn’t provide information about the customer's overall relationship with a product.
The Customer Development Survey: This survey asks, “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measures the percentage who answer “very disappointed.” Although it is an interesting approach to evaluate if a product fits the market, it doesn’t measure customer satisfaction very well.

After careful review, we strongly believed none of these options provided an objective measure of customer satisfaction that made sense for Dashlane, so we decided to build our own.

How we defined Amour du Client
The first step was to meet and align with key stakeholders at Dashlane on a common definition of Amour du Client. We started by mapping the actions we thought satisfied consumers would take, then grouped those actions by common themes.

A chart with “Amour du client” at the center and text boxes branching off. Each box has a number, which corresponds with a hypothesis of the indication power on the demonstration of amour du client, with 0 being “Not at all important” and 10 “Extremely important.” Some text boxes also have a green checkmark representing a high level of confidence in our ability to measure the factor at the user level with the data we collected and the state of our data stack. The text boxes, in clockwise order, read “Leverages any opportunity to propagate Dashlane in their environment (refer peers, spread the Product in their company.)” This box includes the number five and a green checkmark. Next box: “Uses the product (frequency, depth, efficiency.)” This box includes the number 8 and a green checkmark. Next box: “Suggest product improvement ideas.” This box includes the number three. Next box: “Persist to find a solution when an issue occurs (Help center article page views, reach out to customer support).” This box includes the number 7 and a green checkmark. Next box: “Voice their love for the product (social media, rate the product on stores).” This box includes the number 5. Next box: “Expands opportunities to use the product outside of the professional context (Personal, family).” This box includes the number 8 and a green checkmark.

We scored each factor based on their expected demonstration of Amour du Client, with 0 being "not at all important" and 10 "extremely important." Then, we organized meetings with Dashlaners who had customer satisfaction expertise and regular conversations with customers: The Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Customer Support teams. They quickly helped us realize we had forgotten a critical aspect: we defined satisfaction for individual employees, not business teams.

Thus, we built a second version focused on measuring Amour du Client at the team level.

A chart with “B2B Amour du client” at the center. The chart is broken up into thirds: in clockwise order, these sections are labeled Employee, Admin, and Company. In the employee section, there are two text boxes that read "Expands opportunities to use the product outside of the professional context (personal, family),” and “Engagement with the password manager app.” In the Admin section, there are four text boxes that read “Engagement with the password manager app.” Next box: “Engagement with the Admin Console app.” Next box: “Monitoring of Employees utilization rate and vulnerability.” Next box: “Fast and smooth deployment of the product to employees.” In the Company section, there are two text boxes that read “Satisfaction surveys results (CSAT, NPS, CES),” and “Relationships with Customer Success Manager.”

We wanted to use product usage data in our amour du client measurement because it is tailored to the Dashlane customer, can be gathered and measured frequently, and can provide actionable insights. Other, more qualitative satisfaction factors besides product usage data could only be measured through surveys, leading to less frequent measurement and no real-time feedback on customer satisfaction.

Our leadership challenged us on product usage data, though. They said employees could be using the product because they are forced to while not loving it. For example, for years, Dashlane employees were daily users of Microsoft Outlook out of necessity before we suddenly migrated to GSuite. For Microsoft, it would have been very difficult to detect that we would churn based solely on product usage data.

Ultimately, our leadership agreed that measuring Amour du Client with product usage data was a better alternative to existing measures of customer satisfaction. However, they asked that our measurement be flexible enough to include qualitative factors (like NPS, CES, and other types of survey results) to overcome possible forced-usage bias, and so we did.

Measuring engagement for business customers

To capture Amour du Client with a team engagement metric, we ran a data analysis to identify the product usage behaviors driving customer retention. We interviewed key company stakeholders with customer experience expertise on what factors drive customer satisfaction most strongly. Based on our research, we developed 3 indicators that enabled us to measure a team’s engagement at any stage of their time with Dashlane:

Employee Engagement Score: Measures employees’ engagement based on their activity and usage of core Dashlane features. It is a combination of 4 core product behaviors weighted according to their relative importance on user retention.
Admin Engagement Score: Measures admin engagement through key behaviors connected to employees’ product adoption rates. These behaviors should increase the likelihood of employees properly onboarding and using Dashlane. It is a combination of core Admin product behaviors that are weighted according to their correlation with a successful deployment.
The Account Creation Rate (ACR): Percentage of employees invited to join Dashlane who ultimately created their account. We use the account creation rate as the weight for each score component because it helps with focusing on which one is critical for customer retention. For example, a company buying seats not used by any employees will end up churning, and the admin is the only one who manages that. Thus, it makes sense to make the engagement score reflect the admin engagement until a critical share of seats has reached employees. We adjust ACR based on company size because very large companies don’t have the same ease in adopting the product.

A chart divided into two halves. The left half is labeled “Admin Engagement Score,” and the right half is labeled “Employee Engagement Score.” Under “Admin,” there are three bullet points: “Frequently active on Password Manager.” “Frequently active on Admin Console,”and “Business space policies setup.” Under “Employee,” there are four bullet points: “Perform Autofills.” “Share vault items.” “Add secure passwords,”and “Frequently active.”

Using this information, we developed a formula for a Team Engagement Score. It’s a function of the employees’ and the admin’s engagement, weighted with the account creation rate.

Team Engagement Score = ACR * Employees Score + (1-ACR)*Admin Score

A line graph representing the formula for a Team Engagement Score. The formula is “Team Engagement Score = ACR * Employee Score + (1 - ACR) * Admin Score.” The Y axis is labeled “Weight,” and the X axis is labeled “Time.” Along the X axis, the customer journey is represented by arrows pointing left and the words “Purchase,” “Product setup Admin engagement,” “Employee activation,” “Employee engagement,” “New seats bought,” and “Retention/upsell or churn.” There is a teal line curving up from 0, where the X and Y axis meet, and dipping slightly over “New seats bought.” Conversely, a pink line curves down from the number 1 on the Y axis and curves up slightly over “New seats bought.” The two lines intersect over “Employee activation.”

As displayed above, our scoring function is suited to measure a customer’s engagement at any point in its lifecycle, even late in the journey when buying new seats. In that case, the admin should ensure the newly bought seats are effectively used. By design, the weight of the admin score will increase at this moment, putting more emphasis on its engagement.

Delivering the Amour du Client score

Providing data-driven insights to the Customer Success team

We took this Amour du Client measurement method to the Customer Success team, providing a dashboard and automated reports that mixed qualitative insights from the Customer Success team with quantitative insights from the dashboard. This would help each Customer Success manager better understand their business customers’ engagement and satisfaction with Dashlane.

An overview chart of the customer engagement scores and parameters. Two text boxes at the top are labeled “Current Team Score” and “Ranking.” The “Current Team Score” is “9.592,” and this is written in green to denote a positive change with an adjacent note of “1.13% vs. last month.” The “Ranking” is “top 10% of companies with 11-20 paid seats and > 50% of accounts created.” Below, there are three mini charts representing rises and falls over time of “Account Creation Rate,” “Team Engagement Score,” “Admin Engagement Score,” and “Employee Engagement Score.”

The dashboard and automated reports enable:

Customer Success managers to more quickly identify and better support both engaged and unengaged customers. It’s a tool they use to prepare their conversations with the team admins who have the decision power to renew or churn their Dashlane subscriptions.
The Product Analytics team to compare and rank the engagement of business customers with a similar number of employees and Dashlane users.
The Product Analytics team to provide data-driven insights on customer engagement and satisfaction.
- We take these insights to company town hall meetings so all Dashlaners can better understand how they can support our customers, too.
We take these insights to company town hall meetings so all Dashlaners can better understand how they can support our customers, too.
The company to identify Success Stories, understand them, and replicate what has worked well for all customers.

A screenshot of the Team Performance Summary. Four text boxes along the top read as follows: “Account Creation Rate: % of accounts created out of seats bought. 91%.” “Utilization Rate: % of monthly active users out of accounts created. 100%.” “Penetration rate: # of seats bought/company size. 55% to 100%.” “Security Opportunity: % employees in company not using Dashlane. Between 9% and 50%.” Below those text boxes, a list of four icons contains the following information: “Overall recommendation: Currently, 91% of employees created their account and they are well engaged with the product. There might be an opportunity to expand depending on current company penetration.” “Focus area: Team Engagement Score is currently driven by the Employee Engagement Score.” “Admin Engagement: Admin is very engaged compared to other companies’ admins.” “Employee Engagement: Employees are very engaged compared to other companies’ employees.”

Graphs in the product data section representing Admin and Employees Engagement Scores and components. Under “Admin Engagement Score,” two graphs show the Admin Score and the Admin Feature Scores with lines showing trends over time. Under “Employees Engagement Score,” two graphs show the Average Employees Score and Employees Features Score with lines showing trends over time.

Tips for implementing your own data-driven customer satisfaction metric

We’ve used the Team Engagement Score to measure Amour du Client for almost six months now, and it’s been incredibly successful. We have a clearer understanding on how happy our business customers are and who needs our support. And, we’re further aligned with Dashlane’s core objective of Amour du Client.

If you’re part of a Product Analytics or Customer Success team, you might be interested in this approach. Before you start implementing something similar at your company, here are our tips:

Find an executive sponsor to get time and resources for the project.

Get at least one executive sponsor on board. Dashlane’s Product Analytics Manager, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Executive Officer were fully on board with this project. They asked us to deliver the first version of the metric one quarter after we proactively started this project, as well as provide a baseline that we could share with the company. This made it easy to prioritize the project over others and carve out time to work on it.
Work with your executive sponsor to share your end results. Once we had a clear Amour du Client score for all our customers, our CEO added a new time slot to each of our weekly town hall meetings. During this time, Dashlane’s Customer Success Manager talked about two customers, the Customer Success team’s direct relationship with them, what insights they’ve gleaned, and how engaged they are using the Team Engagement Score. This reinforced what was most important to customer satisfaction.

Involve stakeholders from multiple departments in defining the metric.

Don’t dive too early into the technical phase of the project. Start by spending time on the definition of customer satisfaction and challenge it with multiple stakeholders on other teams.
Regularly talk with other teams to make sure your measurement is personalized. For example, we discussed with the Customer Success team what features and behaviors they’d like to see as part of the score. This also helps with getting buy-in.
Involve every Product Analyst in the review of the code and methodology so they understand the metric and can talk about it effectively with external stakeholders. This will also play a role in overall adoption.

Compare your measurement with established baselines and standards your stakeholders have for customers.

Ask your Customer Success team to provide a list of customers and their perceived engagement (very engaged, engaged, somewhat engaged, not engaged).
Validate your Team Engagement Scores against the perceived engagement for those same customers.
Determine if your score is strong and discerning enough to identify each engagement level. This should follow a normal distribution.

Invest in your communication strategy to accelerate adoption.

Don’t wait until you have the final metric before communicating what you are doing throughout your company. Find opportunities to present your progress and use that as motivation to keep up your momentum.
Provide biweekly updates to people interested in the project through a collaborative platform such as a Slack channel.

Build content to educate the company about the metric.

Create content you can reuse multiple times to present the metric: a playbook, a video, and a clean knowledge management space (Confluence, Notion, etc.), for example. Include documentation about everything you built.
Maintain continuous support of the metric with a dedicated collaboration channel (e.g. Slack) for feedback and set up office hours if asked by stakeholders.

Developing this customized, data-driven customer satisfaction measurement has enabled us to identify key ways to better serve our customers and demonstrate Amour du Client. We’re always tracking and improving customer satisfaction so we can make security simple for people and businesses.

Now that you’ve learned a bit about how we measure customer satisfaction, read more on what our former CEO had to say about how we create a culture of security without shortcuts.

Dashlane

Dashlane is a web and mobile app that simplifies password management for people and businesses. We empower organizations to protect company and employee data, while helping everyone easily log in to the accounts they need—anytime, anywhere.