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In the era of Digital Transformation
and the subscription economy,
Michelle Bisset, Vice President,
Customers for Life at Sage Africa &
Middle East, says that technology
companies can only succeed when
their customers do.
A F RIC
CUSTOMER
SUCCESS IS ‘THE
FORMULA FOR
EXPONENTIAL GROWTH’
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T
he rapid shift towards cloud
computing and software as-
a-service purchasing models
is freeing technology buyers
from vendor lock-in, upfront
payments, long implementation cycles and
heavy software customisation. That means
software vendors and their partners need to
focus on continuous customer success if they
are to grow and retain their customer base
over the long run. This was my key message
as a speaker during the Sage Enterprise
Management Partner Summit held in Dubai.
In practical terms, this means we are
seeing customers expect vendors and
implementation partners to help them
deliver against their business outcomes.
Efficiency and scalability are no longer
enough – as the recent IDC European
Enterprise Services Survey shows, the
number one priority for technology buyers is
for their providers to deliver results against
their desired business outcomes.
Customers want inspiration, innovation,
guidance and solutions. If they don’t get if
from one vendor or service provider, it is
easy to move to another in the digital and
subscription world. This means technology
vendors and resellers that want to thrive
in today’s market must pivot to a customer
success-driven approach.
ice
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Customers for Life
The emphasis moves away from features,
functionality and cost towards ensuring the
tech company delivers on the customer’s
business outcomes. If the vendor does not
get this right, the customer will not renew its
subscriptions, let alone buy more solutions
and products from the provider or become
an advocate for its brand.
Here are three steps towards becoming a
customer success-driven enterprise:
expected benefits or run over time or
budget. To improve success rates, vendor,
implementation partner and client must
begin each project by defining what success
looks like in terms of the desired business
outcome and how it will be achieved.
This begins with an honest assessment
not only of the service provider’s ability to
deliver on the brief, but also of its success
potential. If there is a significant divide in
the culture and expectations of vendor and
client, the project is not likely to succeed. The
effort is also likely to fail if the client doesn’t
have the necessary skills, platform or change
capabilities for the transformation.
When defining customer success, a
generic benefit like saving time or becoming
efficient is not enough. One should have a
detailed, measurable definition of success,
whether the goal is better budgeting,
more accurate reporting, cost reduction or
production increases. Knowing the desired
outcome and regularly measuring against
defined success milestones and metrics
increases the likelihood of customer success.
Start with the end in mind Remove silos and barriers
between customers
Large-scale enterprise software
deployments don’t have the best track
record. They often fail to deliver the Leave behind discussions about who
owns the customer relationship within the
enterprise or its wider partner network-