It’s been a month since my first Citrix blog post and two months since I started my new role at Citrix.
I’ve been asked many times to give the elevator pitch for my new role. In my first post, I touched on the newer business discipline of Customer Success / Customer Experience (CX). In this post, I’m going to dig a little deeper on Customer Success and CX, and in a future post, I’ll get more into my specific role as Head of Customer Success Partnerships at Citrix.
I recently read TSIA’s Technology-as-a Service Playbook. A technology trade association, TSIA focuses on CX, and in this book, they describe the traditional customer engagement model as a bucket brigade. Visualize it. It’s so true.
The field sales team talks to the customer — spending lots of time defining requirements, learning the environment, and then closing a deal to sell the appropriate (we hope) technology for their needs. They then “hand off” the customer PO to finance, who then “hands off” the processed order to a delivery mechanism (today mostly digital in the case of software, but sometimes physical devices), who then “hands off” to their implementation team, who then “hands off” the installed client to their support team, who then “hands off” the (we hope) happy customer to the renewals team.
Can you see it? It’s a chain very similar to an old-fashioned bucket brigade, where a bucket gets filled with water and then handed down the line until, we hope, the water in it helps to put out the fire. Does it work? I bet it does, but that’s a lot of handoffs and a lot of opportunities for dropped buckets.
How much better would it be if we could identify where the hydrant was located and run a hose directly to the fire on the other end?
That’s where CX comes into play.
We engage at the early stages to drive better outcomes down the line. We even have a pre-sales Value Engineering team here at Citrix doing great work on identifying business value to help our customers sell their projects internally against the four basic business pillars:
- Reducing risk and ongoing operating expenses
- Gaining competitive advantage
- Increasing incoming revenue
- Enabling your organization’s digital transformation journey
We map the customer journey with our Customer Success Management (CSM) team, working with the customer to create a foundational Success Plan. We store and update the Success Plan in our Success Center portal so that customers, partners, and internal teams are all aligned to the customer journey. Our world-class CSM team then works with the customer to manage the journey and make sure all key stakeholders stay on the right path. Of course, like any good plan, we make adjustments along the way as needed.
We even added a new program recently to help our partners use our CSM methodologies and tools to create their own in-house CSM motions. Why? Because we want everyone focused on one thing — the customer experience! I’ll dive into more detail on our Partner CSM program in a future post, but make sure you ask your Partner Account Manager (PAM) for more information if you’re eager to get started now.
You see? No more bucket brigade. Instead, it’s a great CX journey, from beginning to end.
I mentioned in my first post that I’d like to know about your CX programs, even if they’re in different industries. We’re always advocates for sharing best practices if it means that we’ll be able to better serve our customers as a result.
Finally, if you have any cloud migration projects — regardless of private, public, or hybrid — I want to hear from you on how that journey is going. Let’s talk!
