Data is key to driving customer retention and lifetime value

Managing customer retention to drive lifetime value is a critical challenge for businesses across industries, especially in today's economic climate where CFOs are increasingly focused on cost-cutting and consolidating spending.

A recent Inflexion Commercial Exchange brought together industry experts to share actionable insights on diagnosing customer health by leveraging data, implementing preventive actions, and fostering a customer-centric culture.

“It is more important than ever to retain existing customers and drive their lifetime value given the relatively high cost of chasing new ones to replace lost revenue,” stresses Ada Pham, Assistant Director in Inflexion’s Value Acceleration team focused on commercial strategy. She points out that up- or cross-selling can be difficult if firms are in protection mode, so the key is to drive value and customer outcomes.

She invited Laura Kightlinger, an independent customers success adviser and Dominic Goslett, Chief Revenue Officer of GlobalData Healthcare to share their experiences with the wider portfolio.

Deepening customer relationships by design, not default

Building lasting value comes from anticipating client needs and delivering exceptional outcomes – not just mitigating risks.

That was the key message from Laura Kightlinger, a customer success expert whose experience includes leadership roles at Qubit and Seismic; at the latter, she scaled the International Customer Success team from just her to 22 team members across 4 countries and helped grow revenue outside of North America from <$2m to nearly $50m.

For Laura, customer success is a company-wide mindset. “It starts at the top and embeds itself into how you build, sell, and serve,” she explains. In an age where switching costs are low and customer expectations are high, helping clients achieve tangible outcomes is critical to improving retention and growing customer lifetime value (CLTV).

That begins with knowing your customer, and Laura encourages firms to focus on business outcomes rather than just product adoption. “Log-ins don’t equal value,” she says. Instead, her teams concentrated on identifying high-value behaviours within a company’s platform and using these to define and measure engagement and ultimately customer health.

The health score didn’t just inform strategy; it shaped action. “We used it to prioritise, resource and forecast,” she notes. Changes in score triggered outreach, additional support, or, where needed, escalations. The approach enabled teams to move early – long before renewal conversations began.

Best in class health scoring would overlay sentiment analysis and customer insights from call recordings, emails, and other interactions. The next level enhancement include tracking critical job changes, such as when a CFO or when the ‘champion at a client departs, ensuring proactive relationship management and risk management.

Laura also underscores the importance of cross-functional collaboration. “Retaining and growing customers isn’t a customer services function; it’s an organisational responsibility,” she explains. She advocates for shared accountability – whether through aligned incentives, internal service level agreements, or feedback loops that connect frontline teams with product and strategy. For example, product requests could be logged directly from the front line, then prioritised by customer criticality and revenue impact and fed into roadmap planning.

Technology is central to this – but requires the human overlay. “The best tools help make sense of complexity and surface actionable insights. But without cultural alignment and operational clarity, they won’t move the dial,” she says.

The outcome of this approach is greater predictability in forecasting, improved CLTV, and stickier, more strategic client relationships. As Laura puts it, “Customer success done well is a growth engine – not a reactive function, but a driver of long-term value.”

Using data to drive client outcomes and stronger relationships

Improving client outcomes begins with understanding what success looks like for them. This principle has underpinned a recent transformation at GlobalData Healthcare, where the business has focused on aligning teams, data, and technology to support deeper, more valuable customer relationships. Inflexion carved-out GlobalData’s healthcare business in 2024 through its minority Partnership Capital fund.

Being data-led is at the core of GlobalData Healthcare’s changes, with the team developing a bespoke client health scoring framework, enabling more accurate forecasting and early intervention. Rather than relying on subjective signals such as conversations, the business draws on concrete metrics – such as platform usage, meeting cadence and engagement trends – to assess the strength of a relationship. These scores inform weekly actions, allowing account managers and client success leads to respond swiftly when needed.

“Having a health score that’s tailored to our business gives us a real-time sense of how well we’re serving our clients,” explains Dominic Goslett, Chief Revenue Officer. “It forces us to engage proactively and meaningfully, not just routinely.”

Data also inspired changes to its internal structures. Insight prompted a re-jig of team capacity to ensure focus wasn’t diluted. Executive sponsors and industry-specific commercial analysts were also embedded into key accounts to enhance support. “You have to dig into what is your optimum structure – it’s not always about getting more people. But you need data to tell you.”

Technology has played a key role in enabling this. Conversational intelligence tools help surface insights from client conversations, identify recurring themes, and guide targeted coaching for our sales reps. “Gong’s been a game-changer for us,” says Goslett. “It’s helped us move from anecdotal to analytical – measuring not just how often we engage, but how well.”

Ultimately, the focus is on creating long-term value – for clients and the business. By embedding a data-driven, client-centric mindset across the commercial organisation, GlobalData Healthcare is driving improvements in CLTV and building longer-lasting, more meaningful partnerships.

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