Planhat is a powerful customer success tool and can be configured in many different ways to fit your customer success set-up.

Below we outline the basics to get up and running with Planhat and you will also find this in the form of a set-up Workflow in your Customer Portal.

Needless to say, if you have any questions, ask your dedicated CSM.
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Step 1: Getting your customer data into Planhat

Step 2: Making your data easy to use

Step 3: Customising your Planhat tenant

Step 4: Getting Some Quick Wins!

This is an obvious first step, but the key is determining what data matters for your CS team, where it is "clean" and where you can best access it.

High level, we believe there are 5 types of data that add value to Planhat. You can learn more about them here, but in summary, they are:

🚀 Quick tip: As an Admin, your first goal should be to get 3 of these data types into Planhat.

There are several ways you can bring your customer data in:

Your CSM and TAM will work with you during your Kick-Off call to determine the best source of each data type so we can get your data in quickly and accurately.

If you're using Gmail or Outlook, syncing your email and calendar with Planhat takes only a few minutes and is a very easy quick win for your team.

✍️ Integrating email is controlled by each individual user and all they need to do is:

This article provides more details on how we treat Emails, and this article talks in more depth about our Gmail integration.

Once customer data is in Planhat your aim should be to make it as accessible as possible to both your CS team and any other team thinking about your customers. (note - this should be every team!)

You can create fields on any object in Planhat. These fields will be editable from the data module and become part of your dashboards, automations and much more.

✍️ Have a think about specific fields you want to track in Planhat across all objects. They can be fields you later populate through integrations or data you want to manage solely in Planhat. This article explains how to set them up: Managing Fields

🚀 Quick tip: It's easy in CS to focus only on quantitative fields, but across all objects, you should also consider qualitative fields. For example: on the Company level, what objectives does your customer have? On an End User level, how strong is your relationship with them?

Segmenting your customers is another foundational aspect of Customer Success. In Planhat, we use Filters to group similar Customers, End Users, Invoices or any other data type. They are incredibly flexible, enabling you to create hyper-targeted filters and very specific cohorts of data.

✍️ Start by building filters on your Companies. These become available across the application in the Search bar, so any company-level filter can be used when viewing a dashboard or report, or when creating an automation. Here are some basic ideas to get started: Segmenting data in Planhat. This article explains how to build them: Create Folders and Filters. While you're at it, use Folders to group similar Filters and share them with specific groups of your team members.

🚀 Pro tip: Don't forget to choose what data to display in each Filter - selecting the right columns makes a huge difference!

Over time you will want filters across all data models in Planhat. For example, an End User Filter to identify all your Decision Makers or an Invoice filter to identify all overdue invoices.

One of the key ways you capture data in Planhat is one of the simplest - logging meeting notes. We call these Conversations, and we template them by creating Conversation Types.

✍️ Create your custom Conversation Types. We suggest you name them based on intent or purpose - for example, Training call or Renewal discussion, as opposed to just 'call' or 'meeting'. We think that having 8 - 12 Conversation types is the right balance of specificity and usability. This article provides a good overview of how to create them.

We want Planhat to reflect your branding so your customers and team members feel it is a familiar place. There is a lot of customisation you can do in Planhat, but 2 simple things are adding your logo and your colour palette. Creating your palette will enable you to create on-brand dashboards throughout Planhat.

✍️ Set up your Logo and colour palette, following the instruction here

Email templates are a great time saver in Customer Success. In a perfect world, actions that always require an email follow-up have the template ready and waiting as soon as the task is done. When driving tech touch approaches you also need pre-built templates ready to be sent to your Users.

In Planhat your email templates can be plain text or HTML (plain text is best practice if sending from a CSM) and your templates can include merge tags that reference any fields you have on the Company or End User profile.

Further, your email templates can be associated with specific Workflow steps or Conversation types, or just be kept in a library for when that important moment arises.

✍️ Set up your Email templates as explained in this article: Designing Email templates. We recommend you organise them into different folders using clear naming conventions and try to cover all repeatable processes so your team can save time.

Lifecycle Phases are a foundational part of Customer Success. With them, you can easily see where your Customers are in their journey and they naturally become a part of automations and filters you build over time.

✍️ This article shows you how to set them up: Adding Lifecycle Phases

Creating and logging reasons for churn will help you build a bigger picture of success and failure over time.

✍️ This article explains how to add reasons for churn and what you can do when you start using them. Read it here!

Bringing Planhat to the next level by looking at workflow, automations and dashboards.

This one is a bigger initiative but very doable - plus we are here to help as needed!

There are two main types of Workflows: Projects and Sequences. They provide many flexible options to customise paths based on time, rules or dependencies.

These articles provide an overview of Workflows and tips and guidance when building them out.

Planhat has two different ways to automate the movement of data.

The simple way is to use Automations which enables a 1-to-1 automation between a range of pre-built options.

Automations work on an If this / Then that logic, for example, "If a Company Health Score climbs above 8 / Then create an Opportunity."

✍️ You can read more about them here.

Planhat has a very powerful and flexible BI module called Customer Intelligence. There you can view a range of pre-built reports and tools to better understand your customers, or build your own view of data on a Page.

Pages allow you to draw with your data to create beautiful reports, dashboards and presentations. You can even submit your Pages to our library to share with other Planhat users around the world.

✍️ Learn more by reading these articles: