As a sponsor of SaaStr Annual, DNX got a speaking opportunity. I was excited to be elected to represent. My topic is no surprise to you, if you are a regular reader: the importance of innovation and focus on Customer Success in a rapidly evolving digital business world. In this blog I’ll try to give you a summary of the session.
Digitalization is a tremendous business opportunity. It allows consumers to find a larger variety of options, at their fingertips, in an instant. It allows providers to reach a global market and serve businesses and consumers 24/7. The trend has been going on for quite some time and is now at a point where even more traditional industries (e.g. healthcare, legal) are making the shift.
However, digitalization comes with new challenges. Customer relationships move from person-to-person to users instead directly interacting with your product on-line. SLAs and expectations shift drastically - compare an in-store transaction vs. an online transaction. Organizations need to invest and transform, to meet new demands:
Data-driven is a must: Fewer people-to-people touchpoints mean a need to rely on data collected from customer-product interactions to know your customer. The product needs heavy instrumentation to capture digital user journeys and workflows
UX and resilience becomes top priority: As consumers have more options in a digital market, organizations will need to start competing on customer delight, putting product focus on self-service experiences, ease of use, and not to forget: more investment in reliability and resilience
Support, Devops, and SRE automation: Competing on customer delight requires faster feature velocity, which puts more pressure on efficient delivery approaches - i.e. self-service Devops, efficient SRE, and a seamless Support
Smart outreach and engagement tooling: For Marketing and Sales, targeted outreach becomes more critical. Hence, tools that accelerate engagement and execute smart outreach become important, especially as going digital also means leveling the playing field
At the same time, organizations are expected to do more with less. They now need to find ways to scale efficiently, without throwing more people at the problem. The desire to automate has increased significantly, especially thanks to new hardware and software innovation contributing to ML becoming production viable and economically feasible. With more data available, ML can be a cost-efficient alternative to offload people-heavy, repetitive and error-prone processes.
But ML is heavy lifting. Yes, there is a surge in ML tooling these days - almost to the point of ML tooling fatigue. However, the bottleneck is just as often the data quality, the cumbersome ETL process, and the sparse Data Science expertise. Instead of doing the heavy lifting themselves, many companies choose to instead offload to SaaS. This allows them to focus on their core business, while still not missing out on ML-enabled automation benefits. The pandemic accelerated this wave, as people-heavy processes now depend on a distributed workforce.
Analyst reports on customer services trends indicate that ML will be essential for support organizations to scale efficiently, that the pandemic has accelerated digitalization by years, and that self-service is a cost saving of 10-100x vs traditional support.
So how do organizations need to transform? What do all these challenges mean? Providers need to prepare, transform, and invest.
Customer success is the new revenue center
Instead of a dedicated renewal sales team, relying on people-to-people interactions, the responsibility of the customer relationships will shift in a digital world to Customer Success. The more a customer uses a product, the more revenue is generated. Customer Success’ agenda used to be to provide proactive support: guiding customers to follow best practices and help avoid running into issues. Forward, I predict that Customer Success will also own product adoption and usage growth. The new Customer success is a revenue center merged with expansion responsibilities and blurred with acting as the input channel for product feedback.
Product becomes CX driven and will focus more on resilience and self-repair
The first touchpoint with the customer switches from a traditional sales process with demo, training and PoC, to be directly with the product, including a self-service trial at the most. This means UX needs to be impeccable, self-service oriented, inuitive, and very easy to self-onboard.
At the same time, product is moving away from an artifact that is downloaded, installed, and maintained in-house. It is now something that should just work and be served 24/7. Thus, SaaS providers need to focus on incident management efficiency, automated issue reporting, case deflection, and issue self-repair.
Support is part of the product
Support is shifting towards being more built-in as part of the user experience. In a digital world, you need to meet the user where they are and catch them exactly when they need help, or there is a risk they will move to other options or other tasks.
Product issues are a 10x bigger deal in a SaaS world!
In a world of SaaS, every minute away from usage is revenue lost. If your consumers hit blocking issues, they will turn away from using your product. They will spend that time opening a support case, or worse, abandon the session or service. This is a cold realization for many companies who shift to a SaaS model as part of their digitalization journey. Flaws in the product that are not automatically reported and that make users unable to use the product directly impact revenue. Hence, customer support, customer success, and service resilience become core KPIs to meeting revenue goals ahead. These areas require immediate focus and smart investments ahead. These areas need innovation!
DNX has already started fueling innovation in this space to help organizations succeed ahead.
Commune, a customer success and customer ROI maximization platform, and Techtouch, helping overlay guidance on existing web systems to better assist customers where they are in the online experience, are two examples of our Japan investments. Squadcast and Quark are two examples of our US investments. Squadcast helps democratize SRE to minimize impact of incidents and stress in incident management teams, and at the same time to accelerate resilience to become part of engineering culture over time. Quark is an ML, NLP, and computer-vision based support automation engine that helps speed up case resolution and increase case deflection, by providing resolution recommendations. And we definitely look forward to continuing partnering with entrepreneurs in this space! :)