How Plotly's Customer Success Team Uses Dash Enterprise to Improve Efficiency

One of the best indicators of a product being truly valuable is when a company uses its own platform internally. I’m on Plotly’s customer success team, where we sip our own champagne — and love it.

When you think about customer success, you might picture support tickets, onboarding sessions, and troubleshooting calls. We take it a step further, with a suite of custom-built Dash applications that ease our workflows, automate tedious tasks, and enhance customer experiences. Our goal is to use our very own platform, Dash Enterprise, to improve the way we help customers in turn get the most out of the platform.

In this post, I’ll share the story of how the customer success team at Plotly uses Dash Enterprise to integrate systems, automate reporting, and improve visibility into our key metrics.

How the Plotly customer success team solves challenges for customers

Let’s start with some context.

The Plotly customer success team helps our customers transition from traditional desktop and BI applications to web-based, interactive data apps. This work involves onboarding new users, running technical training, and ensuring customers can develop and deploy their apps efficiently.

A major challenge customers face is adapting to the new paradigm of web applications. Unlike desktop software, where data processing power comes from the user's local machine, web applications require careful handling of data pipelines and performance optimization. The flexibility of Dash Enterprise allows for endless possibilities but flourishes under clear direction and guidance. To this end, Plotly’s customer success team helps customers:

• Optimize their data pipelines to ensure smooth performance and real-time updates
• Define clear app objectives so that teams don’t lose focus and get the best out of Dash
• Bridge technical knowledge gaps, ensuring subject-matter experts can successfully build data applications
• Provide ongoing technical training, making sure customers stay up to speed with best practices

From manual work to automation

As part of my role in leading the Plotly onboarding and technical training team, I originally built a couple simple Dash apps to automate repetitive tasks. One of the first tools I developed was a slide deck generator that pulled customer data from GitHub and Zendesk to auto-create training presentations.

I love working with customers, but I don’t love making slide decks. By integrating different APIs and automating this process, I was able to save a significant amount of time.

That initial success led to a broader effort to use Dash Enterprise for system integrations, real-time monitoring, and customer support tools.

Dash apps built by the Plotly customer success team

Once we realized we could apply Dash Enterprise to our own work, we quickly developed customer success apps that built on what the initial slide maker app achieved, and applied it to different use cases that ultimately helped us better serve our customers. Here are two of my favorites.

Customer success utilities app

This is our team’s main internal dashboard, serving as a central hub for various functions. Key features include:

• Real-time monitoring of customer accounts, providing insights into workload distribution and engagement levels
• Account interaction tracking, to maintain an appropriate and helpful cadence of communication with customers
• Upgrade reporting tool, automating the process of analyzing customer environments and generating email recommendations

Instead of spending hours manually parsing reports and writing recommendations, we built a data app that does it in minutes — and even writes the email for us. We’re thrilled about the new inclusion of Plotly AI for its ability to speed up our new feature development.

Dash Enterprise installation form app

To streamline the installation process for new customers, we shifted from using Google Form submissions to a Dash web app that:

• Collects installation details securely and in a SOC 2-compliant manner
• Writes data directly to ChurnZero, the company’s customer engagement platform
• Sends real-time Slack notifications to alert engineers when new installation requests come in

Previously, installation details had to be manually copied from a Google Form into Zendesk, taking up time that could be better spent debugging or developing solutions for customers. This app allows for automated data collection and reporting, so our engineers can act faster and more efficiently.

Dash Enterprise features we love for building these data apps

These applications make full use of Dash Enterprise’s capabilities, including:

• Onboard databases and a persistent filesystem to support data management and scheduled updates
• Environment variable management to standardize API credentials across multiple apps
• Multi-page app structure and custom design that enable the customer success team to add new features as needed

What we learned from building custom data apps with our own platform

Automating some of our key functions brought a lot of time back into our hands; precious time we could then spend helping our customers. But “eating our own dog food” gave us a unique perspective by letting us step into the shoes of our customers. That kind of empathy made our entire team become a true partner in our customers’ success. 

One of the most important lessons we learned by building data apps in Dash Enterprise is the importance of maintaining those apps. Dash apps are powerful, and they're most potent when we keep them up to date with the team's needs and the Python ecosystem, more broadly. Keeping Python packages up to date and making small adjustments over time ensures long-term value. That balance — between the efficiency gains of automation and the need for occasional updates — is a key takeaway for any team looking to build functional Dash apps beyond standard reporting.

What started as a small automation project has grown into a full suite of internal Dash apps that save time, improve accuracy, and allow us to focus on higher-value work. With Dash Enterprise, we’ve built solutions that would be difficult to achieve with off-the-shelf tools.

If our team can save hours of work and optimize internal workflows with Dash, imagine what it can do for enterprises tackling complex business challenges. If you’d like to learn more about building incredibly useful custom data and AI apps, get in touch with us to discuss your use case.