Personalized Customer Content
Leading managed security provider enables its customers at scale with Enablix powered customer portals
key outcomes
- Higher Customer Engagement
A singular portal embedded within the existing user experience makes it easy for customers to engage and interact with brand material
- Customer Engagement Analytics
Having a holistic understanding of how customers engage with materials saves time and helps CSM’s plan for account growth
- Single Destination for all Customer-Facing Material
Combining collateral into a single portal helps the team understand customer content gaps and see what customers like to interact with
- Value Added to Sales Cycle
Sales reps use the customer portal to demonstrate the company’s ongoing commitment to customer success and enablement
problem
Customer content scattered everywhere means customers don’t engage with material
The organization is built like many other CS teams among SaaS and service-based industries: 20 or so CSM’s handling hundreds of customers, trying to prioritize their users and customers to balance needs and keep accounts steadily growing. However, before becoming a happy customer of Enablix CX, this leading MSP started experiencing a problem endemic to CS organizations:
""We did not have a single place for customers to go to to find content that was searchable in any way, and no single solution to tie together the 5 or so different destinations for support, help, and marketing. So if there were any questions, we would end up sending them to one of these 5 or 6 different places and then they’d get confused as to why they were on the knowledge base instead of the website, or vice versa, and it would end up taking a full meeting just to help fix a simple problem."
While they recognized there was a problem, the organization was fractured on the best way to solve it:
One CS leader felt strongly that they should invest in customer microsites. CSM’s could maintain these microsites for each customer, and keep them updated with relevant material. Engagement analytics from these sites would be sent directly to the CSM’s in charge of the account and help them understand what each client was interested in.
However, the leader of customer enablement was certain that customer microsites were unscalable and would not increase engagement. And, her reasons made a lot of sense:
- She did the math: Each CSM’s was responsible for dozens of customers, meaning that just to update each customer once a week with new content, the CSM would be spending hours every week updating microsites in addition to their normal tasks
- On top of the pain of updating microsites, they realized that customer microsites would become just another source of content. Their inability to integrate with their ticketing system or automatically refresh and provide content to each customer based on their needs
- Lastly, a single microsite would be created for each customer – meaning that no role or user-based segmentation was possible. Every user, regardless of the size of the customer, would see the same view of content.
“Microsites were just never going to work”, mused their head of customer engagement, “it would be such a time suck to be useful that it would have been a major negative impact. An expensive one, too.”
They got in touch regarding Enablix CX, and after just a single demo with their team they were convinced that Enablix powered in-app portals delivered personalized experience at scale for them. But could it integrate with their product? And would customers even engage?
Enablix Admin
Head of Customer Enablement
“Enablix CX has helped us elevate our customer’s experience and enable them at scale without expanding our CSM team – we’re happy we’ve made the investment”
Solution
Personalized In-App Customer Portals Filled with Targeted Content
Once the organization had their heart set on Enablix-powered portals, they had four next steps:
- Organizing their content
- Segmenting their users and customers
- Embedding the portal within their application
- Launching the portal to their customer base
Let’s run down one-by-one to cover how the implementation went:
Organizing content
Since Enablix CX integrates with back-end content sources, important and appropriately labeling their content only took a few hours. But what was even more interesting was how important and organizing their content immediately showed the gaps with what had been created. As the head of enablement says:
“We had most of the content already created, so that was really good – but once we looked at our content heat map we could immediately see just giant gaps of where we had never created anything. The worst part was that we didn’t even know if this was because nobody cared for it, or if nobody cared for it because we never made anything about it.”
After organizing content and creating content requests for the CS and Marketing teams, they then moved on to organizing their customer base to help consume that content.
Segmenting Users and Customers
Enablix CX has the ability to offer each user within the application their own unique view of content based on their customer organization, user role, and behavior – which is what unlocks its ability to make each experience truly personalized. The only requirements to creating these personalized experiences are that 1) user roles and customers are easily identifiable within the application and 2) these roles are set up within the application.
We’ll cover point 1 in a minute, but setting up user roles and customer segments in Enablix was a breeze. Enablix CX integrated with their CRM platform and pulled all the relevant data to help them define these roles and segments. Their CS team, like many, already had a rough mapping of customer types (enterprise, mid-market, and SMB) as well as user profiles – things like admin, highly engaged users, operations, and other roles. After creating these roles and aligning to the similarly labeled content, portals would be personalized for each user based on how they had been designated in the app.
Launching the Portal to their Customer Base
While this was a big question mark for the organization going into the implementation, it turned out to be far easier than they had anticipated:
“Funny enough, the easiest thing for us during the launch was getting the portal in the app. We had to wait like 6 weeks for the software engineering team to have open time in their sprint to put the portal in the app, but once the sprint had started it took like 3 hours for them to push the code to our test environment. From there we tested and found that it was appropriately picking up the user roles and customers and were able to verify that the correct content was being served. After that, it was pushed to production a few weeks later and we started the roll out.”
Outcome
easy access to content accelerates sales
One of the most interesting ways in which the customer portals have impacted their organization actually have nothing to do with CS – it’s how they’ve impacted the sales cycle:
“Our customer university has become part of our selling process . . . if one of our sales reps is offering our MSP services to a manufacturing company, you can imagine they’re giving the demo and going through everything they will receive, but as part of that, in our demo environment, they can show a sample portal. And as part of the sales pitch, they’re saying ‘Look, Here is how we will share with you best practices, integration techniques, everything inside the app.’ So they’re using the portal as part of their demo.”
Enablix CX Overview (2 minutes)
And customers are loving it – user and customer engagement have increased since the initial launch, with engagement in the portal being correlated to likelihood to resign and upsell. Engagement statistics are sent to each CSM to see what users are interested in and what they have questions about.
As for the CS team, CSM’s are reporting a decrease in workload and extra capacity to service customers from time saved searching and sending documents to points-of-contact. And the engagement statistics are allowing them to prioritize which customers to spend that extra time on, either encouraging further upsell or spending time with accounts that are accessing a lot of help information.
On top of the sales and CS boosts, the ability to really see organized content and engagement with their material has helped them to focus their marketing efforts on customer content – whether that’s knowledge base articles that don’t exist, or product marketing one-pagers that explain how features work.
“It’s really kind of created a customer content focus for us” says the head of enablement. “We were kind of blindly replying to requests earlier, and we can hone in on what we really need now”.
But although customers and users are happy and engaged, the progress doesn’t stop there. When asked about what they’re looking forward to, the team highlighted the upcoming integration with their JIRA ticketing system allowing for the portal to really “do it all” and escalation workflows for when customers view upsell content or material indicating they may soon churn. Additionally, the team hopes to start utilizing more of the mutual action plan and engagement hub functionality to create dedicated onboarding plans for each customer.
“Enablix CX has helped us elevate our customer’s experience and enable them at scale without expanding our CSM team – we’re very happy we’ve made the investment”.
