The customer success movement
Customer success has become an interesting topic for software vendors and systems integrators, alike. I am thinking about this topic for a while now and now bring my thoughts to virtual paper after Jon Reed pinged me about it and after reading Josh Greenbaum’s very readable post about “customer successing”. By the way, Jon called software vendors to attention and to deliver proof points in a great article, too. So, call me a copycat 😉. The customer success movement In the past years enterprise software vendors and consultancies alike, have increasingly established customer success teams as part of their organizations. One can almost call it a movement. And it is a laudable endeavor to work on ensuring the customers’ success. However, when looking closer at the reasons for their establishment and their charters, it becomes quite obvious that many of these customer success teams are set up as a reaction to failing implementation projects or, even worse, as a vehicle for selling further services to customer companies. Consequently, metrics that are used for measuring the success of the customer success teams are based around project metrics. Have implementation projects been on time, in budget, and delivered quality results, means they have been successful. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with attempting to improve project success and to generate additional sales. There are still woefully many projects that do not get implemented within the allotted budget and time, and in sufficient quality. Additionally, one can argue that only happy customers do follow-up purchases; and customers are happy because the earlier projects succeeded. I get it. Seriously. I am a consultant, too. Many vendors, often...
How to make Zoho a business’s operating system
During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Adi Mula, founder and CEO of Foodhub. If you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here. Similar to GrubHub and DoorDash, Foodhub allows residents of the UK, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia, the US and some more countries to order food to be delivered from a variety of local restaurants; unlike those other sites, Foodhub does not charge service fees. Foodhub currently has about 1,100 employees. Most of them are using Zoho products in one way or another and many use multiple Zoho products. Foodhub started its Zoho journey with the goal of simplifying processes and to be able to provide every team with simple and easy to use tools that will help them do their jobs. Originally, Foodhub worked with a set of interconnected, yet overly complicated applications. This journey started with implementing Zoho CRM because this was where the pain was biggest in this area. The sales teams in the various countries have different needs, yet the business needs them use a common foundation. The old solution did not support this. One of the problems that were caused by this was that Foodhub used huge Excel sheets to support its sales process. Besides the obvious complexity, this also caused a GDPR risk, as these sheets contained lots of personal data that could have easily be shared online. Moving to Zoho CRM immediately solved this problem by enabling model processes that solved the needs of the different regions while implementing an adequate security and permission model. Migrating...
How to “Zoho-matize” a business
During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Elie Katz, founder and CEO of National Retail Solutions, NRS. if you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here. NRS was founded in 2015 and has since then grown its customer base to more than 17,000 retail stores across the United States. NRS is a part of IDT, a provider of communications and payment services to individuals and businesses. The business provides POS and payment processing software, focusing on small, independent retailers, who want to not only survive but also thrive in a big box environment. The NRS POS system is built to help stores organize, attract customers and increase revenue; it includes a loyalty coupon program and other bells and whistles. An important point is the NRS outside-in philosophy, which is defining its own success as a result of making its customers successful by being able to address their needs. The challenge that Elie, his business, as well as the parent company, needed to support requires quite sophisticated own customer service and sales software; there is a widespread salesforce to be supported along with a good number of very different customers with disparate needs and service requests. The team learned early on that it needed a CRM system. This system was originally supposed to be implemented on a well-known platform – that remains unnamed here. The reason being that it was already being implemented at another branch of IDT. This system needed many third party tools and consequently the implementation dragged along at considerable cost, without showing adequate progress...