At Your Service: Best Practices in Customer Success
In modern M&E technology architecture, it’s now possible for organizations to build services themselves using microservices from public cloud offerings such as AWS, Azure and Google. While building can be empowering, it is often not the best decision. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Cloud-native SaaS solutions offer media companies benefits often overlooked when considering build vs buy. This is part two of three of a new Signiant blog series discussing three of those benefits — Customer Support, Customer Success, and Site Reliability Engineering.
Signiant is especially committed to a high services standard, delivered through the aforementioned three teams that work along-side Signiant product development and our customers.
Let’s explore best practices in Customer Success.
Getting a Customer Started
It’s important to understand what role our Customer Success team actually plays, especially since some confuse Customer Success and Customer Support. While Customer Support is the go-to resource for specific, technical issues, Customer Success plays a bigger-picture role, serving as an ambassador and adviser between Signiant and your business. From the day you subscribe to a Signiant SaaS product, Customer Success works with you to help you get the most out of our products.
With advanced B2B software like that from Signiant, this starts with onboarding your teams. Since SaaS solutions do not require the extensive IT preparation traditional software does, it’s easy for SaaS vendors to be completely hands-off and miss the opportunity to understand new customers’ unique business use cases and educate them on how the product can best be used to address their needs.
At Signiant, every new customer is assigned a Customer Success manager to ensure the product is utilized in the most efficient way for their business. Hence the reason why Customer Success managers like Signiant’s Alexandra Rioux are so vital.
Customer Success: The Art of Communication
“We want to make sure new customers see real value from the beginning, which means we need to understand their business, whether it’s big or small, and their unique applications,” says Alexandra.
Signiant’s Customer Success team guides customers to see the potential value our products bring, tailoring their advice to the individual use cases of a given organization. Often, customers start with a small number of users as they work to acquaint themselves with the new tool. Not only does their general usage grow, however, but they’ll often see expansions across multiple or all departments, with more and more teams getting excited about the collaborative potential they see their colleagues benefiting from.
Customer Success managers are essential to this, not only helping customers achieve that immediate value, but also to understand the new opportunities as the product rolls out across their business. While a customer might have purchased a subscription to Media Shuttle with a very specific or limited use case in mind, very often they’ll organically discover new ways they want to leverage the solution, and their customer success manager is always there to support them in getting those new workflows up and running.
It’s important that SaaS products make this discovery easy and comfortable for the customer. Because we’ve designed all of our products to be as dynamic as the needs of our customers, we encourage our customers to explore the ways that a Signiant solution can creatively evolve alongside their mission.
When onboarding new customers, Customer Success works side by side with the support team (about whom you can learn more here) to make sure everything is deployed and working in the customer’s environment.
You’ve Got a Friend in Customer Success
Signiant introduced the first true cloud-native SaaS solution into the media supply chain in 2012 with the launch of Media Shuttle. Since then, we’ve continued to innovate, introducing two additional SaaS products, Flight and Jet, all built on the same SaaS platform and with the same cloud-native approach.
Our experience growing alongside this technology has made us keenly aware of the customer experience, and what it’s like to dip your toe in the SaaS pool. When it comes to adopting a new solution, a business needs to trust that that solution will meet their needs and evolve alongside them. Customer Success offers robust assurance of this, offering themselves as allies for an organization as its users figure out just how this novel tool will fit into their workflows.
At Signiant, it’s essential that we build strong and dynamic relationships with our customers, and Customer Success managers are at the very heart of this mission. And it isn’t just about onboarding. With adjustments in usage, the addition of new users and objectives, and the simple changing realities of our industry, Signiant Customer Success stays right there beside your users and admins.
