In a previous blog post highlighting our recent changes and additions to the Success Center, we walked through how we used direct customer feedback and data to drive development of the Citrix customer journey. The output is a step-by-step journey composed of five key stages:
- Plan: Setting your project up for success
- Build: Getting started with your solution
- Rollout: Introducing your technology to your team
- Manage: Keeping a pulse on your performance
- Optimize: Finding the best path forward for your business
In this post, we’ll spend some time focusing on a key milestone within the Plan stage: the Success Readiness Assessment. We’ll also briefly explore how the assessment ties into our broader success planning methodology.
Let’s start with a couple of quick definitions.
- The Success Readiness Assessment is a comprehensive framework that we use to help customers understand the requirements, capabilities, and potential risks to success.
- The Success Plan is an execution blueprint that takes the key findings from the Success Readiness Assessment into consideration. It’s a valuable tool for documenting business, technical, and project goals; assigning accountabilities; and helping keep projects on track. We’ll talk more about Success Plans in a later post.
Why Success Readiness Matters
To expand on the definition above, Success Readiness Assessments are a collaborative review between our sales, pre-sales, and Customer Experience teams. They enable us to better determine how prepared our customers are to successfully implement their Citrix technologies and solutions. And they help us identify any gaps that need to be addressed before implementation begins — from resourcing to accountability to infrastructure requirements.
Proactively conducting Success Readiness Assessments can yield many benefits, including:
- Identifying and addressing common roadblocks to success early in the customer journey, ultimately helping us accelerate technology adoption and time to value
- Facilitating smoother handoffs between our pre-sales and post-sales teams and reducing data duplication and inquiries back to our customers, enabling us to deliver a unified Citrix experience
- Understanding the outcomes the customer is expecting, so we can effectively monitor, measure, and drive towards business value and value realization
Conducting Success Readiness Assessments
Our sales and pre-sales organizations conduct a number of discovery and information-gathering activities as they work with customers to align on their strategic vision, solve their business challenges, and define a technology solution. These activities commonly occur before customers make any buying decisions, as they’re considering what solutions will best address their business needs.
Creating continuity for our customers — from their pre-sales exploration to their post-sales journey — is crucial to driving successful outcomes. We capture key project considerations and customer needs in the Success Readiness Assessment, then host a collaborative review with the customer’s entire Experience team, including their Customer Success Manager (CSM), Customer Success Engineer (CSE), Technical Account Manager (TAM), and Citrix Consulting Services (CCS) Consultant.
Our unified Success Readiness Assessment methodology helps us align our efforts internally and create a single source of truth across our customers’ Citrix Experience teams. This ultimately fosters a more seamless experience and helps us drive lasting, meaningful technology adoption for our customers.
As a complement to our internal Success Readiness Assessment methodology, we’ve also developed a comprehensive Success Readiness Checklist. Available in the Success Center, this checklist is free and is an extremely valuable tool for guiding implementation planning initiatives with your team.
The Success Readiness Checklist is based on seven key success factors, shown below. These factors all play an important role in helping our customers achieve their goals and represent the domains we’ve seen fully executed in the most successful customer projects. Gaps in any one of these seven areas present risks that should be addressed. Our Success Readiness Checklist enables us to work with our customers to proactively ask the right questions and resolve these gaps before they become roadblocks.
Creating Space for Stakeholder Engagement
Our unified and holistic approach to success readiness — bringing our customers’ Citrix Experience team together to address their needs across the journey — is a critical element of our Customer Experience (CX) model. And by including key stakeholders from our customers’ teams (including admins, PMO, change management, and experience specialists) in the planning process through Success Readiness Reviews and the Success Readiness Checklist, we can, in turn, help our customers build buy-in and engagement throughout their organization.
What’s Next?
As I mentioned earlier, the Success Readiness Assessment and Checklist are just two elements of our Customer Success Management methodology.
Another important resource in our toolbox is the Success Plan. We recently made some exciting changes and optimizations to this interactive tool — redesigning the experience to align to the seven success factors at the heart of our Success Readiness materials, including additional data capture to drive project milestones, and adding new permission settings to make collaborating with your team even easier.
You can log in to the Success Center to explore the new Success Plan module today. But we’ll dive into more detail and give you a tour of the new experience in our next post. Stay tuned!
— John Bromfield, Senior Director, Executive Customer Success Management
