It’s called Customer Success, and it’s going to be one of the major forces—perhaps the overall #1 driver—that will reshape the cloud-computing industry in 2018. Bob Evans
Bob Evans recently wrote a great article in Forbes about Customer Success and how it is one of the biggest drivers for cloud companies. I highly recommend that your read the full article entitled: Why Salesforce.com, Workday And ServiceNow Are Obsessing Over This New Cloud Metric by clicking here.
Before I get into a high-level recap of the article, we at OpsAnalitica have known about the importance of customer success from day 1. That is why we offer the OpsAnalitica Managed Service and we are the only restaurant checklist and audit platform who does this.
Meaning we’ll administrate the platform for you and we do that for the same price our competitors charge to leave you swinging in the wind. You cannot find a partner that is more committed to your success than us because we’ll manage the software for you, if you want.
Article Recap
Bob quickly covers the history of enterprise software.
- In the past: 5 years ago, a software company sold you some software. You paid for it and it was your responsibility to get it to work in your environment which is where 90% of software problems occurred.
- Cloud computing: now you pay for a subscription to software, the software company does everything you used to do for you, like installing, hosting, managing, uptime etc. That is why everyone wants you to pay for the software every month because they are incurring costs on your behalf monthly. Gone are the days that you bought software once and never paid for it again.
- Just having software in the cloud that is working all the time isn’t enough. Cloud companies have to focus on delivering the ROI that they promised when they sold you and that is Customer Success.
A customer success focus is a natural evolution of cloud computing. Cloud computing solved getting the software to work and now we are turning our attention to getting you a return on your investment which should have been everyone’s focus from day 1.
The article goes on to interview several CEO’s and speaks with them about their takes on customer success.
I’m going to wrap up with this. Your software vendors are your partners. You are entrusting them with your information and they are promising you a return on your investment that will make your business better. Hold your vendors accountable, choose your vendors wisely, and remember that we work for you.
I know that a lot of people miss the good old days when you could buy some software and you only paid for it once. I think a lot of those people don’t remember how hard it was to get the software up and running and to keep it working. I’m going to leave you with one thought last thought; I remember that the salespeople for a large sales company used to say, “don’t confuse sales with implementation” meaning your job is to sell at all costs and if what you sell is impossible to implement that is someone else’s problem, usually the customers.
Cloud computing is here to stay so are monthly software fees, it is truly a better way to go, and with the right vendors, it can make all the difference.