The Challenge

Building Customer Success Analytics Without Enterprise Software

One of the biggest challenges we faced was that we had Salesforce, but we didn't have a dedicated Customer Success platform. As a smaller company with just over $3 million in annual revenue and fewer than 20 employees, investing in a platform like Gainsight or ChurnZero simply wasn't realistic. Those tools are incredibly powerful, but they can cost tens of thousands of dollars each year. While they would have made my job easier, it wasn't the right investment for a company at our stage.

That led me to a different question: How can we maximize the tools we already have instead of buying new ones?

At the time, Salesforce was our system of record for day-to-day customer management, but there were several areas where it didn't meet our operational needs. Renewal tracking, for example, became increasingly difficult as contracts evolved over time. Unless every renewal matched the previous year's structure exactly, reporting became inconsistent. To solve that, we relied heavily on Google Sheets alongside Salesforce, using formulas, conditional formatting, reminders, and custom workflows to manage our renewal pipeline. It wasn't glamorous, but it worked well.

The next challenge was product usage analytics. We used Pendo extensively, and it was excellent for understanding how customers were interacting with the product at a specific moment in time. However, it struggled with two things that were important for Customer Success. First, it didn't provide an easy way to identify customers with zero product usage. Second, it wasn't designed to easily compare usage trends over time so we could see whether adoption was increasing, decreasing, or remaining stagnant from month to month.

After researching different options, I discovered that Salesforce's API could be used to export customer data into Google Sheets on a scheduled basis. Using Google Apps Script, I built an automated process that synchronized our Salesforce data into Google Sheets every four hours. Because Salesforce already contained the usage information from Pendo, including accounts with zero activity, we now had a continuously updated dataset that we could manipulate however we wanted.

From there, I developed another Apps Script that automatically reorganized the data, captured monthly snapshots, and generated usage trend reports that were emailed to both me and leadership. Instead of manually pulling reports or trying to compare data month over month, the process became completely automated.

That solved the reporting problem, but it also created an opportunity to solve something even bigger: building a centralized Customer Success dashboard that gave leadership immediate visibility into the health of the business.

Looker Studio

The dashboard shown here isn't the one I built for my previous employer. That dashboard contained proprietary customer information, and since I've moved on to another role, I can't share it publicly. Instead, I've continued using Looker Studio for my own projects, including my job search, to demonstrate the same concepts and capabilities.

The dashboard we built internally ultimately saved the company approximately $40,000 per year by eliminating the need for a dedicated Customer Success platform. Rather than purchasing additional software, we leveraged Salesforce, Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, and Looker Studio to create a solution that met our needs using tools we already had.

The dashboard consisted of multiple pages tailored to different operational needs. Leadership could immediately see key performance indicators through summary cards displaying metrics such as renewal rate, revenue renewed, projected churn, upcoming renewals, and overall portfolio health. Additional pages allowed us to drill into specific customer segments, monitor upcoming renewals, identify at-risk accounts, and analyze trends over time.

The biggest benefit wasn't simply having a dashboard, it was having a single source of truth. Instead of manually pulling reports, recalculating spreadsheets, or assembling data before every leadership meeting, everything was automatically updated and available in one place. Weekly business reviews shifted from gathering information to discussing strategy and taking action.

For organizations looking to gain better visibility without investing in expensive enterprise software, Looker Studio proved to be a powerful and cost-effective solution. By combining it with Salesforce, Google Sheets, and Google Apps Script, we built a reporting platform that delivered meaningful insights while keeping operational costs low.