| |OCTOBER 20219fering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products where re-tention is a core concern, given that customers have the flexibility to turn-off usage at any time or after a limited time. Even for products that serve an internal user com-munity at large enterprises, annual budgets are updated based on perceived usage and impact. So, internal cus-tomer management is as relevant as external customer management for the professional growth of the parties involved in serving internal customers. In today's Covid impacted world, where labor is hard to find and the abil-ity to interact with others in person is minimal, the need for a digital platform is becoming critical for customer or account management. Now, companies have deployed CRM (customer relationship management), support desk, email campaign, and survey tools to manage some of these needs. Let's review how they are performing today. 1. CRM systems manage open sales opportunities2. Support desk software tracks logged issues and prod-uct bugs3. Email campaign software sends specifically com-posed emails to a selected end-user audience for a specific purpose, such as to advise end-users about a new product version, update, issue, or company developments4. Survey tools collect feedbackThe challenge with these piecemeal steps is the lack of an integrated system with a holistic view to create a seam-less link across these products. The team that picks-up the implementation work post-sale typically never uses a CRM system and manages the customer interaction via miscel-laneous MS Office products or project management tools. Support management manually reviews issues or bug trends in other reporting tools such as Power BI. Prod-uct management teams track enhancement requests in a separate system, such as in one of the Atlassian products. Product usage metrics, buried in the companies' digital platforms, are pulled-out and analyzed manually in third-party business intelligence tools. Due to these disparate ar-rangements, senior management constantly struggles to see the top-level end-user subscriber view to decide the next steps. High-level account executives struggle to see the ac-tion items associated with key customer issues when talking with customers. Customer success professionals manually engage with end-users individually or by launching mass email campaigns with standardized content.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >