CHAPTER 1
1. Facilitates a Seamless Handoff from Sales
Why it’s important
Your sales team fought hard to win the customer for your business, so you don’t want to lose any time building your customer relationships, or lose any key information stored on the opportunity.
By leveraging automation based on the criteria on your opportunity you can pick the right template from your library to allow your success team to follow best practices. Your solution should allow multiple projects to be active against your customer at any time.
How you benefit
- Seamless connection from sales to project delivery keeps everyone on the same page
- Follow best practices by leveraging templates
- Avoid double entry of data and information
- Provide real-time visibility for your Customers, Sales & Account Teams of Project Progress
CHAPTER 2
2. Captures your Customer Goals & Requirements
Why it’s important
If you don’t have a clear idea of what your customer goals are at the outset of your engagement, how can you possibly forecast the real value your customers are expecting from working with you?
By not only defining your client’s goals, but by also capturing their requirements and scoring each requirement for how big an impact it has on meeting the client’s goal, you can prioritize your efforts to deliver maximum value for your customers in the time you have available.
How you benefit
- Know your customers goals and the impacts each will have on their business
- Map requirements to your customers goals
- Prioritize work on the requirements that will deliver the most value for your customers
CHAPTER 3
3. Lets You Map Out Key Stakeholders
Why it’s important
Being able to track stakeholders on each project gives you insight to the key decision makers at your clients, along with what is important to each of them. You can also include key personnel from Partners who are important to your ongoing client engagements.
Add in the ability to assign RACI responsibilities for each stakeholder and the communication plan for your project becomes clear.
How you benefit
- A single source of truth where anyone on your team can see who is who, at you customers business
- Clear responsibilities for both you and your customer helps keep everyone on the same page
- Stakeholder based communication plans make it less likely that key information can slip through the cracks
CHAPTER 4
4. Standardizes Your Client Meetings
Why it’s important
Ever run a successful customer-facing project without holding a meeting with your client? Didn’t think so!
Meetings are a critical part of a successful client engagement so you should look for a tool that incorporates meeting templates and minutes capture into its core workflow.
How you benefit
- Automate creation of the right meeting agenda at the right time during your project
- Standardize meetings across your team based on best practices
- Onboard new team members faster with meeting coaching notes
- Share meeting minutes with your customers stakeholders, keeping everyone on the same page
CHAPTER 5
5. Keeps Your Customers Up to Date
Why it’s important
Customer Success is a collaborative process between your team your customer and potentially even a partner.
Gone are the limitations of sharing a PDF of an MS project schedule with your client. Your modern solution should come with a real-time update and/or a community you can share with clients covering much more than just timelines, with information such as meeting minutes, change requests and more, keeping everyone on the same page.
How you benefit
- Less time needed from your team, update the project in one place, and your customer is updated in real time
- Single source of truth for everything connected to your project
- Open communication throughout your projects that builds customer satisfaction
CHAPTER 6
6. Always Available KPI Reporting
Why it’s important
Collecting data is one thing, but presenting it to your management team in a manner that lets them make informed decisions to improve the business is another.
That’s why you need your customer success solution to come with not just a set of out-of-the-box reports but is also customizable by your business users, so all the reports and dashboards that your executives need to make decisions to drive your business forward are always at hand.
How you benefit
- Report on all your KPIs in real time 24 hours a day from any device
- Visual dashboards with drill down capabilities to the underlying details
- Configurable to your unique business needs
- Scheduled email updates of your key reports
CHAPTER 7
7. Online Training & Certifications
Why it’s important
When you invest in a solution it’s typically the start of a multi-year relationship with the vendor and the solution. Over time, new releases will roll out and your team will change as people move roles and you bring on new hires.
So you need a vendor with a strong online training solution to keep your staff up to date and onboard new employees. Look for a vendor with training broken out by roles, and one with a certification program, so you can measure your team’s training effort.
How you benefit
- Keeps your team informed of the benefits your business can get from updated versions of solutions
- Gets your new hires up to speed quickly on your key business solutions
- Certification programs let you find qualified staff with pre-existing competence in your onboarding solution