Customer Success

Customer Success

Customer Success Influencers

Stephen Danelutti Leave a comment

Not much elaboration needed but a few words just to be clear about what I am saying in this doodle:

  • These three elements of product, service and strategy are the biggest (but not only) influencers on the success enterprise customers have with the use of their technology. For instance I believe the sales process and what is promised has a huge impact too but not for this list.
  • I’m indicating with the size of the circles which ones I believe have the most influence.
  • The pull and push points relate to the nature of the influence on the use and ultimate success of the technology.
  • I think most of the items listed in each area are clear enough but if you are not on the job to be done point I added a link to a good explanation. And on professional services, by these I generally mean paid for services delivered by the vendor or partners and could include things like change management, training, etc.
Customer Success

Customer Success outcomes and their causes

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what leads to customer success and how can you manage that for enterprise software as a service

I’m trying to distil the essence in this doodle, often for my own sanity, to help me focus on the right activities in the work I do with customers.

Ultimately its for colleagues and customers, to help them understand and rally them behind my efforts 😁

It’s fairly self explanatory I think as I wanted to keep its simple and within a framework of three – three main outcomes, three main causes for each outcome. But here is some brief elaboration.

  • Activities are sequential. You can only get to value when you have done important pre-work, i.e. introduce a new tool and focus on its use, then how it should be scaled and embedded in real work and then on changing behaviours and driving real business impact.
  • But planning and focus is nonsequential. You have to start with the end in mind and work backwards – what are you trying to achieve, what is necessary to achieve it, how to measure it, what activities will drive it, etc.
  • These activities are all that matter in customer success. Everything else is peripheral. If you can get people to focus on these things, their supporting activities and the measurement of them then you will be successful. If you lead a team of customer success managers, remove everything else that does not contribute to these activities or gets in their way.
  • By supporting activities I mean things like tools to track these activities and the impact they are having, measurement systems, playbooks to drive the correct activities, systems and governance, etc.

One caveat to emphasise: These are activities that apply largely to the enterprise Software as a Service category in which I have the most experience.

I’m by no means perfect in my views. These are based on roughly 8 years in a customer success role. But I spent approximately 2 hours on putting this together. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed something so would love to hear from you if so 🙃

As a Service, Customer Success

Update on As a Service Trends

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The latest and greatest posts and research on the subject and these are all being tracked with a tag here. I include Customer Success in this being a subset of the As a Service trend but I’ve added it under a separate section.

Customer Success

Customer Success, Future of Work

Beyond Technology Adoption – Business Scenarios with Microsoft Teams

Stephen Danelutti 1 Comment

Microsoft Teams is such an incredible work productivity tool. It doesn’t just bring work from other applications into the conversation but the whole tool itself. That plus the ability it offers to structure activities into logical workflows provides perfect context for bringing business scenarios to life.

Business scenarios are an important mechanism in beyond adoption to drive business value.

Check out a brief intro and demo I’m using with customers into the use of Teams in the context of an example business scenario (marketing), focusing on getting things done and driving value.

As a Service, Customer Success

Update on As a Service Trends

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Click to enlarge and view separately

I’ve not had a chance to post for a while and there has been a fair bit of activity in the space so I have quite a bit to share.

I have also run a few numbers through the data visualisation machine and come up with the infographic at left – feel free to use and share.

So herewith some of the best posts from recent weeks.

New SaaS Delivery Models Require New Customer Success Delivery Models. A solid piece on how Customer Success roles need to change in the maturing SaaS space. Sticking with the SaaS space, this article does a really good job of explaining how to manage your vendor if you use a SaaS product: How to manage SaaS Vendors in the Subscription Economy. And for some other really good posts on these themes:

New entrants to the space

These include:

This collection of announcements above 👆 shows the sheer breadth of industries effected by the As a Service trend – nothing is off limits.

Industry specific news

There were a batch of articles and new research:

Trend indicators

Here is a good summary of the trend which includes commentary on all the different industries being effected by the subscription economy: Subscription Services Draw Companies Closer To Customers. As with so many of the posts that I reference to the subscription economy, this one points to its darling Zuora, as you can see from the source of the chart. But their standing at the top of the subscription economy heap (as a company that powers the economy) may be under threat as new entrants join the fray: Stripe billing launches in Europe to power subscription companies across the continent.

There are other signs of a growing consolidation and integration in the Subscription Economy and Customer Success industries with the announcement by Medallia of their Strikedeck acquisition. Also Customer Success leader Gainsight’s announcement of the broadening of their portfolio into a “Customer Cloud”.

As a Service, Customer Success

Update on As a Service Trends

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Nuggets from the last few weeks. If you have any similar announcements, reports or good articles, please share in a comment as I’m collecting them for a new eBook / trend report 😁

Customer Success, Sense Making

Thought Rocket: Anatomy of a Perfect Customer Success

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I captured a few simple points in a video a few weeks back in a flash of contemplation (hence thought rocket). Other than capture and share it here I wanted to elaborate a little. First the video:

The first thing to say is that customer success is not an isolated event or activity and this video and its content should not be taken to mean that.

Customer success is a series of purposeful activities or events which over time lead to the customer achieving their intended outcomes.

That is my super simple definition specifically as context for this post.

The 5 points captured in the video are merely outcomes that can be captured at any given time and may characterise a single moment of success. There could be many others. These are my top five. These and the others happening repeatedly over time would constitute long term customer success. This would be the true customer success.

So now onto a wee bit of elaboration on each of the 5 points because this is a thought rocket after all and I don’t want to over think it.

1. Outcomes

Probably the most important thing about any short or long term success is that a business outcome is achieved. Of course the ideal is that it is positive and satisfies the customer but I would also say that it should be the result of purposeful intent. That means you achieved what you set out to achieve. Unintended outcomes can happen and you can even allow for those and they can be of greater consequence. But better would be those that were achieved as a result of purposeful cause and effect planning because this can lead to repeat-ability.

2. Stories

Being able to capture a success in a way that it inspires greater use, adoption, success and value creation is best. Not all successes can be made into a great story. Stories are what capture the imagination and drive greater momentum but the detail of that is for another post.

3. Reuse

If the success can be reapplied in the same area (team or department say) or ideally even more broadly (another team or even department or company) then so much the better. This again drives further use, adoption and success and is fundamentally a scale lever.

4. Measurable

The ability to quantify or qualify the success in some way greatly increases the value of the success. Nothing succeeds like tangible, measurable success. Especially if it fits in with predefined targets you intended to achieve and then you blow them out the water. I’m talking KPI’s baby 🎯 😁

5. Permanence and impact

If it succeeds in changing behaviour and sticks then so much the better. Most customer success efforts are oriented around driving a change in behaviour so that different outcomes are achieved. This is most often the promise of the new technology being sold, implemented and adopted. So this becomes “très importante”.

What else, what have I missed, what would be your top 5 – let me know in a comment if you dare 😜

Customer Success

Adoption Hacks

Stephen Danelutti 1 Comment

Adoption hacks are little tips and tricks you can use to stimulate adoption of technology. Actions that can include any number of activities, all designed to get users learning about, understanding and using features of a technology to get new value from it.

Activities can be anything from communication, learning components, social proof (showing how others are getting value) all the way to mandating something. All is fair when it comes to adoption hacks :)

I’ll start documenting what I am doing and what I learn about from others in the way of adoption hacks in posts like these.

At the moment, at Microsoft, I am focusing heavily on Microsoft Teams adoption. Teams is is seen as a platform play because it is the front end to a lot of other tools in the Office 365 technology stack as well as those outside through various integrations.

Teams is extensible and customisable so that you can reach users in their chats, channels, notifications and personal workspaces. A single app can provide one or more capabilities.

They enable users to make decisions and take action faster. They reduce context switching on important tasks. They create opportunities for collaboration around external content. They make for the perfect adoption hacking tools in other words 😁

Teams apps come from different publishers. 1st party apps are developed by Microsoft for Office 365 or Office workloads as mentioned and enable better together scenarios. 2nd party apps are those not built by Microsoft and are popular work applications enabled in a central location (the store you can access in Teams). Custom apps are built by your organisation to meet specif business needs. Just some examples below:

  • Bots help users get tasks done in conversations. I’m using https://zoom.ai/ a lot at the moment in Team channels and in direct conversation with the Bot and its great for things like setting reminders to follow up on actions that stem from conversations.
  • Tabs surface rich content within Teams. For example, O365 activity usage reports from PowerBI that can be discussed and actioned right from within Teams
  • Connectors allow you to post rich updates from activity in other applications into your Team feeds.
  • Actionable messaging adds rich interaction to your connector cards so you can act on new information you receive from ☝
  • Compose extensions allow you to query and share rich cards in conversations.

Conversational AI and the new dynamics of computer assisted collaboration and automation to aid adoption

One key learning we’ve had at Microsoft is that Bots, custom line of business applications that integrate business processes, and ‘ready to use’ applications integrated into Teams = stickiness and relevance that keeps users coming back every day and drive company-wide adoption.

One very specific example of this I am making use of with my customers to support end users is combining Teams and the Microsoft Bot framework to create Q&A Bots. Users can query the Bot and get answers to questions on Teams as well as other applications. In my case I am focusing on other O365 related applications but it could be used for any.

Here is documentation on some Bot service templates which can be used to get started building Bots and includes one on to build a Q&A Bot.

Dentsu Aegis Network have done a great job with this and you can read this article to find out more: Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) builds Teams chatbot to drive internal adoption of new technologies.

This is such a great example of using new technology to support adoption of technology which I am hugely motivated by. I’ll be sharing more as I learn in this super interesting space.

As a Service, Customer Success

Update on As a Service Trends

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As I think more about this whole space and track the developments in it with posts like this, I’m trying to envisage dynamics of the perfect business in it.

That gave rise to the DanelDoodle at left. Just some fun and very quick so not sure they are absolutely right. I’ll get a better feel for this as I complete my new trend report / eBook on the subject and it may become clearer and a little more scientific.

Anyway onto latest developments which is always the purpose of these posts in the form of announcements, articles, etc.

If you have any As a Service examples please share in a comment as I’m collecting them :)