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Apps help businesses better serve their customers each and every day. But don’t take my word for it; on two recent Connected Leaders webinars (which you can watch on demand here and here), I spoke with customers who are using AppExchange apps to meaningfully connect with their customers.
From personalizing a guided tour to stopping the loss of information, below are some of the ways that business leaders saw how AppExchange apps helped provide better experiences for, and deepened relationships with, their customers.
Providing a personalized experience makes customers feel they are the most important people the company has ever served. For Steve Cundy, Co-Founder of the Wildland Trekking Company, Conga Composer helped his company, which provides guided tours for people around the world, with that extra special touch. “With Composer we can get information out to the right people, quickly and easily. All of the little details that have to be communicated to the guides for our guests can be done automatically,” Cundy said. “Rather than our customer service team having to remember to take good notes on a customer and get it to the guide, they can put that information into a field on the customer’s reservation, and the guide will have that information. All the details for each guest, like dietary requests, birthdays, or anniversaries, is guaranteed to get to the guide before the trip.”
While customers don’t need to know about how your internal processes function, they certainly stand to benefit when your organization is transparent, communicative, and running on all cylinders. According to Emily Lough, Corporate Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at energy storage company Maxwell Technologies, their customers saw a major impact as a result of Maxwell’s implementation of Apttus Contract Management, which provided that visibility and clear communication to customers.
“We’ve heard from our internal client base that the visibility into contract statuses helps them step into the process and get better turnaround times,” Lough said. “The sales team and our customer base is believing that the information that comes back to them is more thorough, and there’s greater context. Instead of just receiving a ‘no,’ or a counterproposal, there’s a ‘no’ and here’s what we can do to compromise, or receiving a counterproposal with more information on how to get it approved.”
When customers call to find out the status of an order or project, nothing is worse for them than getting passed off to different departments and having to repeat their questions. The customer experience is far smoother when everyone in the company shares a common customer record – sales, services, finance, and support. This amplifies knowledge across the entire organization, no matter how many customers and projects your teams are running.
Douglas Caira, Vice President of Worldwide Professional Services at Imprivata, a healthcare software company, implemented FinancialForce PSA to turn the customer experience around. “Before FinancialForce, we were using a lot of spreadsheets,” Caira said. “We were losing information, and we weren’t engaging with our customers as well as we could have. FinancialForce improves the customer experience by having all of the information at our fingertips. At any given time, my team manages up to 250 projects. We could not track that information — or that quantity — without FinancialForce.”
If your company ships a physical product, ensuring that product is in stock, tracked, and delivered in a timely fashion can be the difference between a repeat customer and a customer who seeks out a competitor. Making sure your supply chain and product management processes flow smoothly can go a long way toward delivering customers’ products on time.
Mark Collins, VP of Operations at Primus Power, a producer of flow batteries, said that Kenandy Cloud ERP helped improve the process from product idea to creation to shipment. “We want to get products out to our customers very quickly. When we have a new product or an idea on how to improve a product, it’s no good if we can’t get that product into our customers’ hands,” Collins said. “Today, an engineer can release a new product in our product lifecycle management system, and that product is available in Kenandy within minutes. Once that item is in Kenandy, we get the benefits of the sourcing history, cost history, full supply/demand history, what’s on hand, what parts we’ll need, and the full genealogy of parts. We have full visibility across the production cycle, all the way through to the post-sale field support.”
Your customers should never feel like it’s a part-time job to do business with your company. Goertz Billerbeck, Managing Partner and Chief Communications Officer, Aequitas Group, saw the amount of work his customers had to do.
Billerbeck implemented Docomotion to significantly enhance the document generation and management process. “Customers now have a central database with documentation. It helps both with getting approvals on documents, and also integrates direct data within Salesforce so that customers have running reports,” Billerbeck said. “They also have documents to send to our international headquarters, which collects all of this data. After the first implementation we did with freelance approvers, they even asked if there were a different set of documents that we could use with Docomotion, instead of their own software they previously used.”
Fall in love with even more apps and their customer stories by joining us for our next Connected Leaders webinar on March 29, or visit us at appexchange.com.
