Do you consider your solution provider to be a trusted advisor? If you answered yes, you’re in the fortunate minority. According to Deloitte’s “Enterprise Customer Success Study and Outlook Part 2: What do customers value?”a mere 25 percent of customers consider solution providers to be their trusted advisors.
The fact that customers look to solution providers as trusted advisors is a very important aspect of the customer-service provider relationship. As the Deloitte study shows, though 90 percent of customers discuss business goals and objectives with solution providers, nearly 50 percent say that purchased solutions only partially delivered desired outcomes.
There can be several reasons for it. One fundamental reason is, the solution adoption process is not very tightly tied to the identified business outcomes that the organization wants to achieve. This is exactly where BMC’s Customer Value Realization Program (CVR) is focussed on enabling customers to achieve the desired business outcomes by defining a strong success plan, and defining solution adoption programs that are jointly executed by the Customer and BMC.
The phrase “Value Realization” is primarily two sides of a Coin. One side is the realization of Value for BMC in terms of driving customer success that results in expanding the business with customers, efficient renewal closures, as well as increased trust of Customers on BMC. The other side of the coin is value that BMC Solutions bring to the customer – helping them to achieve success around their identified business outcomes.
Being a trusted advisor for our customers is part of BMC’s DNA and this behaviour is driven by the value of “Champion our Customers”. We have a strong history of serving and advising enterprise customers across the globe and, as a part of our evolution to an Autonomous Digital Enterprise, continue to refine our processes to better serve our valued customers today and into the future. BMC is taking a customer-first approach across the entire organization with every role and function helping influence and drive customer success. It is all about embedding “Customer Success” as a behavior and culture across the organization.
An ideal CVR program should be designed to ensure that customers get maximum attention from solution providers throughout the lifecycle with Targeted Value Based engagements. In addition to a business-driven mindset to help your customers succeed, CVR should have a command of the entire set of solutions, understand how the business can realize the value, and provide thought leadership in the customer’s industry. The post purchase or renewal model has shifted from vendor complexity to customer journey efficiency, adoption, and value realization.
Here are couple of examples of how BMC has been enabling customers achieve their intended value-based business outcomes via this Customer Value Realization program (CVR) –
Example 1
A broadcasting company in Europe who is an existing BMC Helix customer was facing a specific challenge of tickets landing at the Level 1 service desk that were largely of “How To” nature. This increased the operational cost and resulted in redundant work for the service desk agents as they had to largely point to already created Knowledge Articles while more important issues were getting delayed from a processing and closure rate point of view. Customer highlighted this as a key challenge that they wanted to address at the earliest. Basis this understanding of the problem situation, a discussion was initiated as part of the CVR engagement that focussed on enabling the customer to adopt automation as well as establish a self-help based service process. Post a series of product demos, use case walk throughs on how the current process will change and bring more efficiency, productivity and more stronger end to end process experience the customer provided all the necessary approvals to implement the planned changes. The customer can measure very transparently the tangible benefits derived with this new process and also measure the process efficiency on the service desk agent side too by deflecting such queries to the new self-help process.
Example 2
IT department of a manufacturing company has been running multiple change projects that are owned and initiated by Change Owners. When these projects are executed, if there are issues then the users / employees report tickets that land at the Service Desk Agents bucket. With no integration between the Service Desk and the Change Projects that were being executed, service desk agents had to work manually on getting more insight of the change project, the reach the correct owner to get clarity on the issue being reported etc. This delayed the response time for the issues being reported as well as increased the MTTR index of the service agents. On the other side, because this integration was missing, the Change Owners and the Change Board didn’t get transparency on the quality of the projects being executed, the number of issues being reported as well as status updates. This is where the CVR resource stepped in to educate the customer about a capability that needs to be leveraged to achieve the desired business outcome. A successful POC helped the Change Team of the customer get complete clarity on how their business requirements will be met, the enterprise level reporting that can be used as well as how the process integration simplifies the service desk agent experience in responding to the issues being reported by employees.
Examples like these and many more have proven that such partnerships with customers, have enabled the customers realize the true value of their investments in BMC Solutions as well as establishing BMC as a trusted advisor for the Key Stakeholders of customers.
In The Customer Success Economy, authors Nick Mehta and Allison Pickens state, “Customer expectations are higher, customer power is greater, and holding onto customers is harder because they have so much choice.” This is exactly why BMC is making difference with our customers. It’s a company Wide commitment to drive customer success with all facets of the organization engaged in helping customers reach their goals.
Conclusion:
In the study published by Deloitte and referred at the beginning of this blog, 66% of customers have provided a feedback that they are highly satisfied with the help received from service providers in tracking the true value of the solution they are adopting. By adopting the Customer Value Realization program as a proactive customer engagement mechanism, BMC will increase the % of customers that affirm purchased solutions deliver the desired outcomes.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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