Gainsight, headquartered in Mountain View, CA and established in 2009 provides customer management solutions by leveraging "big data" analytics across sales data, support ticket, and other sources of customer Intelligence. The company has received funding of $30.4 million from Summit Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

When I joined Gainsight as CEO and told my mother about our focus on customer success she said, "So companies are just now starting to think about their customers' success?" At first, I was going to explain to her that the old business models did not depend on customers getting value since customers paid upfront and were basically "stuck" in a contract. But instead, I just sent her a photo of Larry Ellison's island.

Today, organizations are switching out their vendors as quickly as they are bringing them in. Companies of all sizes are realizing that they need to become critical partners in their client's success for long-term relationships. The trouble is that many of these companies lack the data-driven insights to understand how customers are using their products and where the opportunities are to upsell for cementing brand loyalty.

Big data has become the hero who can help companies tackle this problem head on. Tools have become increasingly sophisticated and are assisting companies in driving customer value through data science and automation. With this technology in your arsenal there are several ways you can scout customers with the highest lifetime value. Here are some ideas:

1. Gaining insight into your customer's past is crucial to their future success.

Achieving customer success requires not only good customer relations, but also good customer insights. However, merely capturing customer data at any point in time is not going to help identify your best customers, as it requires context and trending. Ongoing customer relationships could be redefined by insights into their constantly changing usage patterns. Using robust trending analytics that are drillable and sliceable could ensure no one slips past the cracks.

2. Be clear on how your customer is using your product.

How customers use and engage with your product is a key metric of success. During the critical on-boarding period, your implementation and support team should keep close tabs on usage data to know when to swoop in to nudge adoption and drive value. With more mature customers, your product team should also analyze patterns to improve product usability and intuitiveness. Marketing and sales teams can also rely on usage data to identify advocates and growth prospects.

3. Don't sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains

Revenue and product usage data are key to maintaining customer success, but that data should be analyzed through a long-term perspective and treated as an asset set for payoff. For example, many vendors, when determining customer success, pay attention to only revenue numbers. This is a short-sighted approach. Where you gather that data is just as important as what you do with it. Data from support, community, billing, and even their social media presence and activities can help reveal everything about your customers. In other words, don't overlook the long-term ramifications of your customer health for short-term revenue numbers.

Data is transforming industries and business processes around the world. It has stepped in and effectively turned the revenue funnel into an hourglass. If you still have not leveraged data to understand your existing customers after they come on board, what are you waiting for?