Inside Qlik’s customer success organization, we work with our customers for many different reasons – providing full time implementation services; offering platform, performance or security guidance; offering product support; conducting training in-person or on-line; or delivering almost any kind of deployment or advanced analytic assistance that may be required.
Sometimes, our customers comes directly to us asking for help, but more often, we get referred to a customer by someone else at Qlik – or by one of our many partners – who is as passionate about seeing their customers as happy and successful with their Qlik solution as we are.
Case in point: I was talking with Roxanne Rowe, a Senior Customer Success Manager (CSM) who has been with Qlik almost three years. She was telling me about how, when she is first engaging with a customer, she takes time to get to know her customer. One piece of information that she looks at is the quantity, timing, and types of product support tickets the customer has submitted.
In one case, Roxanne found that the customer had a pattern – similar problems were being reported by different users – but within their organization, everyone thought their problem was unique.Mostly because no one within the customer site was looking at all the tickets to see that many were reporting the same problem. But also, that many of the problems being submitted had received a similar response, that what was happening was not a product issue but a deployment issue. Meaning, that somehow the issue could be resolved by changing the way they had deployed Qlik.
The situation was a classic case of the customer “didn’t know what they didn’t know”.First, they didn’t know that many different users were having similar issues, and two, they wouldn’t know the tips and tricks that someone who has deployed Qlik multiple times would know that can quickly improve usability and/or performance of Qlik. But, the customer had been reticent of using any professional services – Qlik or otherwise.
Roxanne quickly helped the customer by bringing in experts from other parts of Qlik who assessed the situation and provided recommendations on how to improve their deployment, some of which would require some outside help as the customer did not have all the expertise internally. In the end, the customer did bring in Qlik Education and Consulting – realizing significantly more return on their investment – and has since become one of Qlik’s biggest advocates!
But not all situations start from the point that there are problems. Roxanne told me about another situation where, after spending a bit of time learning how the customer was using Qlik, she helped them see that they were not taking advantage of all available capabilities in Qlik that would have satisfied some of their user requests.But, again, it was a situation of the customer “didn’t know what they didn’t know”.And the result was similar.She brought in experts who helped provide recommendations, some of which would require additional help, but more importantly, the customer found they were getting much more value out of Qlik, and much sooner, then had they kept trying to figure it out alone.
So, what’s the point of my story? True customer success takes a team. And not just any team: people who are focused and passionate about ensuring that you get everything you want out of Qlik (and then some!).
