“If the customers don’t understand the product, what are the chances they are going to use it, let alone renew it?”
The problem
A global technology, software and services company was experiencing challenges in adoption and renewals of its largest cloud-based product suite. The company was using a classic SaaS technical support model, answering questions only when approached by a customer. Because of this, customer onboarding was complex and took too long, customers were not using the cloud-based office productivity tools to their full potential and renewals and the number of deployed seats and associated revenue for the product suite lagged expectations and projections.
The client sought to outsource the execution and operation of a portion of the onboarding process for this suite of tools, but they needed an aggressive plan to increase adoption, not just the typical reactive technical support model that focused on increasing the volume of completed tickets.
The Blueprint Way
As with any transition to a cloud-based product, technical support for customers is imperative. To increase adoption and renewals, however, customers must also understand the potential the product has and how they can utilize key features and benefits in their own environments. Using the standard technical support model of focusing solely on customer problems as they arise leaves little room for that level of education.
“This client has many competitors, so they needed to look at customer education as much as sales” said Blueprint Solutions Delivery Director Paola Taylor. “If the customers don’t understand the product, what are the chances they are going to use it, let alone renew it?”
Blueprint looked at this client’s strategy and recognized that it could be improved with a more proactive customer experience and began this engagement with a mission to create partnerships with all customers. With that in mind, Blueprint built a team of technical onboarding experts for the client, training 30 employees who would comprise two teams: managers who could proactively reach out to customers, learn the needs of their business and what tools were available to them, and technical engineers that could help solve onboarding and launch challenges. Within the first year of the onboarding center’s opening the team onboarded nearly 2,000 customers and added more than 2.6 million new seats (licenses) to the cloud service.
Blueprint’s dedicated team of onboarding experts now focuses on proactively engaging new and existing customers to strengthen relationships and share knowledge. Sometimes, a customer working with a third party owns licenses for a product without knowing it, and Blueprint helps those customers fully realize the benefit and value of the products they’re already paying for.
Blueprint’s team has grown to more than 100 Blueprint employees in Charlotte, North Carolina and Las Colinas, Texas, locations that allow for fluid coverage across U.S. time zones. Blueprint’s proactive model has not only helped the client turn a perennial cost center into a profit center, but its agility has allowed Blueprint to quickly adapt to the changing market and the evolution of the product suite itself, continuously adding value to the client and its customers.
