Truly valuing customer success requires equal parts focus, vision, and execution. The focus and vision comes from within, and is as easy as getting buy in from the major stakeholders at your business. But to execute, and actually deliver an outstanding experience for your customers, you need a team that has the right tools at its disposal.

On the May edition of the Connected Leaders webinar, I spoke with two customers who have delivered better experiences to their customers through their use of AppExchange apps. Those customers were:

• Peter Yates, Head of Operations, Platforms & IT at Spark Ventures, on behalf of BMC Remedyforce
• Gabe Saslafsky, Head of Technical Development at Engineering Express, on behalf of FinancialForce PSA

Read on to learn how to improve your customers’ experiences with the use of AppExchange apps.

1. Always know the status of your customers’ projects

Whether you have hundreds of projects, or a few very complex projects with numerous stakeholders and steps, it’s critical to have information at your fingertips. But without the right technology, finding the project status, milestones, and results can be more difficult than a fossil excavation. Apps can help deliver this information to you, instantly.

Saslafsky said implementing FinancialForce PSA significantly improved Engineering Express’ customer service when customers called to ask about the status of a project. “Information is now available at a glance, so there’s no need to go in the back and talk to anyone about it,” he said. “It used to be that asking someone about the status of a project required a callback. Now, 15 seconds later, you look it up and have the answer to tell the client. Clients are happier.” The implementation of FinancialForce PSA led to an average of 1,300 hours saved on projects for Engineering Express across an entire year.

2. Execute changes faster for customers

Even with the best products and processes, projects will inevitably hit bumps and require slight course corrections. But apps can help process Requests for Change (RFC) in minutes, not hours or days. In turn, your customers will enjoy agility and responsiveness, and will likely express higher satisfaction toward your company.

Using BMC Remedyforce, Yates’ team saved 80 hours per month by reducing the submission time of RFC forms to 10 minutes. With BMC Remedyforce, “What we were looking for is something that had the rigor without the rigmarole,” he said. “We’ve now got our dev op teams and ventures using the change process. It’s been a really good journey. It’s enabled us to be agile to keep up with the pace of change that the ventures need to keep competitive in the market.”

3. Remove obstacles in the way of customer success

Yates said that by making it easier to escalate issues with BMC Remedyforce, the number of physical interruptions during work dropped. “It reduced the number of times people would be tapped on the shoulder with a question, and email exchanges,” he said. “Because the team isn’t getting shoulder tapped all the time, they’re pretty happy. If you’re not interrupted all the time, you can actually get some good work done.” 

For Saslafsky, moving to Salesforce and FinancialForce PSA streamlined systems and made input errors a thing of the past. “The thing that was holding us back was our systems. We had a system for project tracking, a system that approximated a CRM, another for vaguely quoting, and none of them talked to each other,” Saslafsky said. “The beauty [of FinancialForce] is that it’s all seamless with Salesforce. Everything is all in one exact place.”

Don’t forget to register for the next Connected Leaders webinar on June 30, AppExchange Apps to Liberate Yourself from Your Desk.