SUCCESS STORY: designing implementation for a new market

The client, an enterprise technology provider, was in the midst of beachhead contracts within a new market, the cloudscale and SaaS customer segment. The client's portfolio and organization was built based on other markets, and knowledge of this market's requirements was nascent throughout the client.  The customer personas and ways of working throughout the lifecycle presented significantly new approaches for the client's project implementation and support engines.

The client was seeking to reimagine the relationship with its customers to lay a new foundation for customer success and value realization.  We engaged to stabilize the client’s relationships and cross-functional customer success teams, with the goal of developing one or more sustainable value propositions for future growth.  

We conducted internal and external relationship and market diagnostics, generating a gap analysis of existing organization and portfolio offers to the new market's target outcomes. Through a series of workshops, we initiated several experiments to align interactions and operational processes differently, while building on top of the client's service delivery engine at scale. 

Several of the first experiments were in organizational design, culture and talent planning. These experiments resulted in the development of new roles for customer persona alignment (technical program manager role (TPM), product owner for customer/client testing) as well as adoption of SAFe and SRE practices and workforce planning. 

In order to improve customer success in long-running programs, we focused  innovating in communication, agile commercial and delivery methods.  We also accelerated the shift of complex human-centric interactions in support and network performance to an API model in order to reduce customer effort. 

The engagement concluded with a cross-functional growth-oriented workshop that linked to an earlier business model canvas. Participants in the workshop left with a series of outcome-oriented value proposition experiments and a new Kanban construct for cross-functional execution. 

"...began with a comprehensive overhaul of our customer experience, focusing first on both team dynamics and the organizational culture. Erika's work revitalized our approach to customer experience, uniting previously disparate functions by rallying them around our distinctive customer personas and their specific work methods. Her ability to infuse fresh insights and new strategies into ongoing customer interactions significantly enhanced overall customer outcomes." 

-Tuan Bui, Accounts Director

The client recognized both a reduction of customer effort and an increase in realized value with implementation and application development outcomes that were tailored for these unique customers, reflected by double-digit professional services growth in this new market. Streamlining and aligning the ways that multiple development, test, support and success teams worked cross functionally improved effectiveness and the client's project profitability significantly, setting the stage for future investment to expand into new software innovation motions for expansion of the customer relationship.