Get to Know Your Customers Day: The Importance of Customer Success

Customers are the driving force behind our company, which is why Get to Know Your Customers Day is so important to us! Although we work to show our customers appreciation daily, we wanted to use this national day as an opportunity to dive deeper into our customer relationships. 

With the help of Deb Rupert, Customer Success Manager here at OpenEnvoy, we look at the importance of getting to know our customers and walking beside them in their procure-to-pay journey. 

We all know customers are the most critical asset to any company, but can you help us understand why it is vital to learn about the AP team's needs from the very beginning?

It's imperative to meet people where they are, listen, and learn: we want to make a connection. At OpenEnvoy, we are all-in and invested in our customer's journey. The more we fully understand their existing accounts payable process and challenges, the more value we can bring during onboarding. We can discover what matters most to the customer and help them ensure they successfully capture early ROI. 

Beyond understanding the challenges, we also make it a point to know how the challenges impact their team and organization. We help our customers understand the implications to their business if nothing changes and things stay the same. More often than not, we learn that their current AP processes are not sustainable. Customer Success (CS) looks at the issue from a holistic lens to assess what is at stake, such as:

• What opportunities is the team missing out on, and how are they being limited by their challenges? 
• What vendors or solutions have they tried previously, and why didn't they work? 
• Is there high attrition because of overwhelmed employees? How is employee engagement being impacted? 
• How are their challenges hurting their progress towards organizational goals?

New customers are often surprised at how much information we've gathered and mapped out before the kick-off call even happens. We partner with our customers and ensure they know they are supported by accounts payable experts. 

One of our customers from Bliss Point Media even said, "I cannot tell you how many times I've been sitting in a pitch after talking to the sales rep who takes 15 to 20 minutes of my time and puts a generic PowerPoint in front of me. That is not what OpenEnvoy did! What we saw at the end of it was what we asked for: a presentation addressing our concerns, talking about how you would actually be able to solve our problem… They spent a lot of time with our team going through our processes." 

The Customer Success team's goals are to provide tangible ROI that continuously grows, shift reactive processes to proactive, and keep collaboration flowing to uncover gaps and areas for improvement.  

How does the Customer Success Team at OpenEnvoy prioritize the customer throughout the implementation?

At the beginning of the relationship, we partner with Sales to fully understand a customer's challenges and goals. For example, when finance leaders come to us, they are often looking for solutions to fix their broken accounts payable process. It is not uncommon for them to be incredibly overwhelmed with a lack of resources like time and headcount to manage their workload. In many cases, they know they are overpaying vendors but don't have the payables data to understand the actual cost or business impact of the inefficient process. Our CS team leads with empathy because we know how frustrating and defeating this can feel, which is why we work to inspire joy using our platform.

Many teams are looking for a low-friction payables solution that allows them to save time and create resources for more purposeful, value-driven work. With a proven ROI, our technology offers tangible benefits like: end-to-end spend visibility, automated reconciliation, duplicate detection, and a full forensic audit, just to name a few, but our customers also receive other invaluable benefits like happier, more fulfilled employees.

What becomes apparent for companies who start their journey with OpenEnvoy is that they begin to see how much our team cares about providing solutions that work. We care that our customers enjoy their jobs again and make it home in time for dinner. This is why we are hyper-focused on building collaborative business partnerships. My favorite part of getting to know new customers is when these light-bulb moments happen, and they start to have hope that their current way of doing things can be better. Our customers see the relevance of our solution against their challenges and trust us to take them on that journey. 

What are the hallmark signs of a good customer relationship?

While relationship building is an ever evolving process, here are a few staples for a solid vendor-customer foundation: 

• Consistent communication: Keep customers well-informed and ensure priorities are aligned
• Knowledge sharing: Promote new features and updates so customers can take advantage of them immediately
• Accountability and transparency: Take ownership of commitments and manage expectations
• Goal alignment and re-calibration: Track the right things at the right time and keep a pulse on developing goals
• Collaboration and advocacy: Advocate for the customer's feedback to show that you value their input
• Be relentless about the customer's success: Be excited for and invested in the customer's success

We know customer input improves the product, but how important is it to have a continuous feedback loop?

It is imperative to have consistent and open communication. We constantly measure- whether it is against onboarding objectives, customer KPIs, or a specific feature request. Our team is obsessed with customer feedback; we use it to advocate for our customers across the organization. It's also important to ask questions about the customer experience and what we can do differently. We have a thing for ensuring our customers have the best experience possible. We love hearing new ideas and uncovering new challenges to solve, which benefits all of our customers.

How does CS maintain the relationship post-implementation?

Learning about the customer never stops. We see ourselves as an extension of the customer's team and are relentless about their success. We follow their journey, champion their evolving needs, and celebrate all of their achievements. Therefore, it is essential to establish a regular meeting cadence to maintain an ever-growing relationship.

For example, we provide regular business reviews to evangelize the customer's KPIs against ROI captured using OpenEnvoy. We use these metrics to set new goals, share our upcoming roadmap for what's relevant to the customer's priorities, and learn what's on the customer's roadmap. 

Our product design team also conducts regular product workshop sessions where they focus on the use case, deep dive into the process, discuss potential solutions, and share mock-ups. It's a unique opportunity for customers to invest in the evolution of OpenEnvoy. 
Are you ready to go beyond the average vendor relationship and work with a true business partner who measures their success by how much you win? Schedule a demo with an OpenEnvoy expert today, visit https://openenvoy.com/contact-us/.