Beyond support: The impact of customer success in tech services

There is a reason customer success has emerged as a prevailing trend in the capital construction space. By consciously focusing on the success of their customers, technology providers can empower them to extract maximum value from their investments, ultimately reducing the time-to-value ratio. As a digital technology provider for capital programs, Aurigo aims to empower customers by customizing products to address their unique needs. This approach enables them to derive tangible value from their investments and cultivates customer delight and advocacy for our products. 

Reflecting on Aurigo’s journey, it is clear that we diverge from the typical SaaS landscape, where the sole focus is on resolving issues and maintaining bug-free applications. As an enterprise solution provider, we recognize the uniqueness of each customer, each with distinct business goals. It is our job to comprehend these goals and actively contribute to their realization. We understand that a one-size-fits-all workflow does not suit everyone. To truly make a difference, we must delve deep into how each customer plans, budgets, executes, and manages priorities. This in-depth insight can help us build solutions according to our customer’s needs while ensuring they are easily configurable, flexible, and scalable. System adoption can present formidable roadblocks that hinder customer success. By recognizing these challenges, we can develop distinctive adoption strategies such as: 

• Understanding customer goals—What motivates customers to choose a particular product? Are they seeking to improve productivity, reduce costs, increase revenue, upgrade an outdated system, or seamlessly integrate existing systems with new ones? 
• Understanding user goals—What challenges do users encounter and how do they prefer to address them? How is their performance measured? 
• Understanding how customers assess goal delivery—How do they measure the success of the technology provider in delivering goals? Will they gauge success by quantifying labor cost reductions on projects, calculating decreases in project management expenses, or evaluating the speed at which multiple legacy tools and products are replaced? 

Handling these tasks can be complex. As providers, our initial step should involve mapping out functions and identifying individuals within the customer’s organization with whom we can collaborate. We need to then capture requirements, recognize needs, link them to the initial buying decision, obtain signoff, and ensure that we are aligned to deliver on those requirements. The next step is to develop a training and support plan, which can be the most engaging and fulfilling phase of the process.

Easy-to-follow training materials can help users quickly grasp the system, allowing them to derive the most from it while supporting the agency’s ability to maintain continuity.

The key to customer success lies in continuously monitoring and evaluating how the system is used (or not used!). This involves capturing and analyzing user and usage data to identify patterns indicating either a lack of adoption or suboptimal system use.

• What are users doing? 
• How often are they doing it? 
• What should they be doing to help improve ROI? 
• How can we increase the user base? 

As tech providers, we must put this data back on the table, pointing out potential gains and reductions in time to value. This can lead to understanding how incomplete functionality impacts usage, if added functionality or training materials need to be provided to specific users, what strategies can improve user habits, and if there is a need to set up user support communities.

Customer satisfaction has become a key component of program and project delivery in recent years. This is evident in the increasing frequency with which customers request to see the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in their RFPs. This shift reflects the understanding that a satisfied customer ensures success and strengthens long-term relationships and business growth. In the traditional world, a customer goes live with a system and relies on a support team to fix issues. In the world of customer success, it’s the opposite.

The focus is on driving value, building features that fit the need, customizing workflows, adding new users, reducing time to value, and reassuring customers that they are on the right track.