For the past few years, much effort (by software companies) has been put into the concept of customer success. Some might argue that customer success is simply a rebranding of customer support, but I disagree. I think customer support is reactive, but customer success is proactive. Also—customer success needs more commitment and action from both the technology partner and the client.
HubSpot has a definition of customer success that resonates with me:
“Customer success is the process of anticipating customer challenges or questions and proactively providing solutions and answers to those issues prior to them arising. Customer success helps you boost customer happiness, retention, and customer loyalty.”
While much of the responsibility relies on your technology partner or vendor, I thought it would be useful to explain some of what our most successful clients are doing on their side to achieve favorable outcomes:
Bring your plan to the table and be sure to document it- Many clients who implement Laserfiche only know a small portion of everything it can do. There’s not a single department in a municipality, that can’t use a workflow or a form. If you’ve got a plan, please share it with us. If you don’t, we can help. Also, don’t forget many of your neighboring agencies use Laserfiche and are happy to share how they use the product. That’s a terrific thing about local governments, everyone I’ve ever met is very generous with their Laserfiche experience and knowledge. If you are in the RFP process, really take the time to dig into the references and don’t shy away from talking to IT and the department heads. They’ll have different but equally valuable perspectives.
Have a champion(s)- Hopefully, there’s someone in your organization who gets bitten by the Laserfiche bug and develops a genuine enthusiasm for the product. The project champion is the person within an organization implementing a project who takes on the burden of ensuring everyone involved is on board and behind the ultimate success of the project. All the RunSmarter winners have a Laserfiche champion in their organization, which is one of the reasons they have such interesting implementations. Sometimes the person is IT but not always. A project champion can be a member of senior management or have critical expertise that strengthens a project’s value by adding their experience and enthusiasm to the mix.
Find a quick win- Look for the quickest process to automate or form to build. Do that first. Then, talk about it, demonstrate it to other departments, calculate the time saved, or even better ROI. Make sure your team is invested. Quick wins get buy-in for further development
Involve yourself in the management of the project- The more you know about the details of the project the better. You'll be able to give actionable feedback, plus I think it’s good for clients to understand the inner-workings of workflows. Who knows, you could learn to build them!
Leverage CPS and Laserfiche resources- Please leverage all the CPS and Laserfiche resources that are available. Have us train as many of your staff as possible or set up a train-the-trainer model. Also, attend Laserfiche’s Empower and take as many labs as you can fit in. Additionally, Laserfiche puts on great webinars, so, check those out. Finally, be sure to attend our Ask the Experts Webinar on August 19th at 11 AM.
Comments