How locale.ai is winning hearts with an outcome-based approach to customer success
Imagine you won a brand new private jet in a lottery and it’s now parked in your own hangar. What’s the first thing you’d do with it — hire a pilot or call priority support?
Having a machine that can fly you anywhere in the world, right next to you, and being clueless about how to do anything with it can be a painful place to be. This can happen sometimes with the SaaS products we buy as well.
Buying a SaaS solution to fix a particular problem with your operations may sound convenient. However, its implementation and adoption across your workflows can be a lot more challenging — especially when your business is driven by assets that move on the ground every day.
While Customer Success promises to bridge this gap that exists today, it is often misunderstood for a team of experts offering seamless product support while still leaving the burden of discovering value to the end-user.
Talking to thousands of operations managers across industries and listening to their challenges along our journey, we realized that traditional approaches to customer success also had to be redefined along the way.
Read on to learn about how re-looked at Customer Success on our journey of building a no-code control tower for operations.
Why does it matter?
Let’s take the airplane story we started with, for example. As a clueless customer, if you call the airplane company’s helpline, they’d help you with the list of agencies for hiring a pilot, maintenance, and operations crew. Customer Success at a software company would similarly have led you to a blog article, community thread, or a link to their 1:1 office hours when you have questions.
In a world where conversations are being automated using bots with artificial intelligence, we believe enabling end-users to drive business outcomes in the real world requires a lot more than just scheduled emails and automated bots.
That is why we adopted an outcome-based approach to our customer success where you get a team of consultants that understand your operations.
Our Approach
Your on-ground operations can only be as efficient as the people responsible for them. That is why a deeper understanding and empathy towards the everyday workflows of actual people on the ground is very crucial to us. Through our discovery meetings, we have spent thousands of hours talking about the problems operations managers face across the globe.
Learnings from these meetings have enabled us to realign our customer experiences from an expert-driven model to a consultant-driven approach that is personalized to your workflows and business outcomes.
This is why we strive to join our customers in their journeys as partners, not just as software vendors. Here’s how we do it:
Our Version of Onboarding
Our previous experiences have taught us that customers use tools in their very own ways and sometimes in some unexpected ways. This is why we’ve adopted a high-touch, assisted onboarding approach wherein we work closely with your key decision-makers and end-users in aligning your business cases with our product features.
This is how it happens -
Discovery Phase
Every engagement with Locale starts with a step we’re most proud of — Vision Exercise
It is a collaborative exercise where we sit with you and your teams to understand your pains, workflows & short and long-term business goals and come up with a vision document that outlines how those goals will be achieved with Locale.
While this happens over a series of interactions with your teams, we’ve included a sample document to give you a quick glimpse into the outcomes of a typical discovery call.
Click here to download a sample vision document for a typical on-demand delivery company.
Pre-Onboarding Phase
🎖 Objective: To understand the questions to which you and your teams would like to find answers with Locale.
Before we even start talking data and metrics, our implementation engineers along with Customer Success deep dive into your business operations and specific use cases. This not only helps us understand your workflows but also helps us customize the training programs for your teams at later stages.
What happens at this stage?
- Gathering your data requirements: understanding details like your order volumes, number of user events, fleet size, etc.
- Deep diving into your use-cases & key business metrics: understanding the north-star metrics of your business and unique use-cases to help you go more granular with your operations data.
- Understanding your immediate operational problems on a service area level and defining short-term goals that you’d like to achieve with Locale.
- Ingesting sample data from your existing systems to your new dashboards on Locale and validating it with your data and operations teams.
- Setting up live pipelines for your data, so that our systems can read that data at regular intervals enabling you to seamlessly derive insights from both your real-time and historic data.
Onboarding Phase
🎖 Objective: To help your end-users realise the capabilities Locale brings to their existing workflows and also enable them to take independent data-driven decisions.
In this phase, we work with your teams to ensure that not just you as a decision-maker but also the end-users across functions get familiar with Locale and enable them to make data-driven decisions, using your very own operational data.
What happens at this stage?
- Circulation of onboarding manuals and customized how-to guides unique to your specific use-cases.
- Set up customized checklists and reports to track your team’s adoption progress.
- Onboarding calls with your end-users across functions.
- A 3-week long in-person training program
Long term Value Delivery Phase
🎖 Objective: To bring our collective experiences and learnings across industries together and align them with your vision for maximum value delivery.
Our goal post the onboarding is over is to constantly ensure your operational excellence is headed in a direction as decided in our initial vision exercise and all your end-users are trained enough to derive value from your operational insights using Locale.
This is a combination of several activities spread across the first few months after your ops control tower is up and running.
What happens at this stage?
- Quarterly monitoring of your enterprise-wide adoption and the value Locale delivered.
- The Locale Promise — A 3-hour SLA time for all your questions via a dedicated Slack hotline.
- On-demand refresher and advanced level training sessions to keep your teams updated with the latest standards in industry practices
- Monthly business reviews and status reports to your senior leadership (optional).
- Create collaterals to keep your internal teams updated on our features and their application in their workflows.
What to expect when you partner with Locale?
Locale is not just another piece of software you add to your existing stack. It’s a sandbox where operations teams can come together, collaborate and run experiments to crush their KPIs.
You’re in for a rewarding experience with a passionate bunch of people who share your pain and vision. Here’s one of our happy customers talking about how we engage with our customers.
Still in doubt? let us clear them once and for all — Book a call with one of our specialists to have all your questions answered today!
Originally published at https://blog.locale.ai on April 22, 2022.
