April 5th saw, for the seventh time, Toronto Customer Success executives get together over breakfast to discuss the still young and rapidly evolving field of Customer Success.
For over a year now, my co-host Natasha Narayan and I, have invited senior executives in the field of Customer Success to get together to share their knowledge and expertise amongst their peer group.
Sponsored by Gainsight, the breakfast is an opportunity for Toronto’s leaders in Customer
Success to convene, exchange ideas and further define industry best practices.
This past week’s assembly had Peter Armaly, Principal Transformation Advisor at Oracle, present a session entitled “Stop focusing so much on renewals! Drive adoption and everything else will fall into place.”.
Peter shared how Oracle Marketing Cloud has deployed a self-help platform that anticipates what customers need to adopt product, and guides them forward by making the right material available to them at the right time.
Using usage data and the customer journey – knowing where in the adoption lifecycle the customer is – Oracle has developed a platform that nurtures customers along automatically.
Depending on where a customer is in their journey and what they are trying to accomplish with the product, Oracle will point the user to the specific and relevant self-help material.
By virtue of using usage data and knowing where the customer is in their adoption journey, the platform can predict what type of information the user will need to continue along in their journey.
As such, a lot of questions that would typically be raised with the Customer Success Manager (CSM) or support are deflected allowing the customer to continue making progress with the technology while saving the CSM’s time.
Rather than spending time answering repeatable questions easily answered with readily available material, the CSM can focus their effort on strategic, value add interactions with the customer.
The group, enthusiastic to learn how to implement more automation as a means to scale adoption, had a number of questions.
How did Oracle know what content to feed to customers and when? What role does Product Management play into driving more efficient product adoption? How would this work in a B2C environment or amongst different users in a B2B environment?
A lively discussion ensued and participants walked away with great ideas for using their existing content (education material, knowledge base articles, video how-to’s, support tickets, etc.) to promote user adoption in a predictive, just-in-time content delivery approach.
Bottom Line
Efficient and effective adoption is key to driving renewals. If adoption is solid, everything starts to fall in place thereafter.
Understand the customer’s journey and the various user personas to determine what content users will need at various points of the adoption journey.
Once those needs are known (i.e. anticipated), use existing content and applications such as automated nurture campaigns to deliver the right content at the right time in order to pre-emptively answer customer questions and facilitate automated self-help.
In doing so, customers help themselves to successful product adoption and CSM’s spend more time with customers on strategic activities that drive additional value-add.