Context: Insent is an early stage start-up selling to midmarket and enterprise customers. As a small team, Customer Success at Insent is today responsible for everything in the post sale journey, including onboarding and implementing their software for customers.

Guests: Prasanna Venkatesan - Co-Founder and CTO

           Karthik KV - Customer Success Manager

           Shyam Ganapathy: Customer Success Manager

Customer Experience Lessons from Implementation and Onboarding

  1. Your customer support team is your customer’s north star - they look to your CS team to get the best out of the product/service
  2. Each stage of implementation calls for a specific set of CS skills:
    1. Solutioning: critical thinking, problem solving, product expertise, expectation setting
    2. Implementation: people skills, coordination and prioritization, foresight
    3. Success: pro-active, critical thinking, foresight, grit
    4. Expand: critical thinking, problem solving, product expertise, expectation setting
  3. Your customer success team needs to put themselves in the customer's shoes, this helps them keep the latter's point of view in mind while drawing up solutions
  4. It is important for your CS team to understand your technology and product, and the customer’s domain and business
  5. Provide your customer with the white glove treatment - give them the best experience, and the experience they desire
  6. Approach implementation based on the customer's maturity level. Insent classifies customers based on their maturity level into 'Gen-1' and 'Gen-2'. The approach of each of these categories to implementation and onboarding are starkly different:
    1. Gen-1 customers are those using a product like Insent for the first time. They have a basic to advanced use case, they look at CS as an SME, and expect them to provide best practices and guidance reg product. They look at data for basic to advanced insights and decision making.
    2. Gen-2 are customers who have used similar products in the past. They have already solved advanced use cases with similar tools, CS is seen as a facilitator who will help them further accomplish their goals. They also tend to make advanced data driven decisions - they look at data to see why something is working and why something is not, or if tweaking something will have better impact.
  7. Identify touchpoints during your implementation process that are crucial to ensuring a great customer experience. Insent's implementation process includes 4 essential meetings/calls:
    1. Strategic alignment call - This call serves to introduce the teams on both sides to each other, and ensures goal alignment. This call is the first step towards relationship expect to understand the use case and initiate relationship-building
    2. Deep-dive call - Agenda being platform config, establishing an understanding of the features. By the time the customer comes to this call, the platform is already set up; get the customer to be a bit hands-on
    3. Testing call - Agenda covers talking about open issues; to solve these issues and help realize platform benefits
    4. End-user training call - Agenda is getting users to use the platform; outcome is to establish usage
  8. During all of the above calls, it is important to list tasks/action items with owners and target dates
  9. These 4 stages have a lot of activity happening in the background:
    1. At the customer’s end there is identifying stakeholders, getting IT/Security approval, getting the necessary integrations in place, managing internal coordination, internal approval and sign off; parallelly
    2. At your end you may have internal coordination and platform configuration for the customer

Challenges/Learnings

The Insent team also shared the challenges they faced and the learnings they derived from solving them.

What worked