The success of our clients is at the core of what we do as a company. We have a dedicated team to ensure this, they go by the name, customer success.
With the success team set to double in size in the coming year, we thought we'd take this opportunity to explain why we make customers our top priority, how we help them succeed and why no two customers are the same - especially in real estate.
Wondering what the difference between customer success and customer service is? While customer service is reactive, focused on the short term and owned by a single function (for example, just the customer service team), customer success as a function is proactive and focused on helping a customer achieve their business goals.
Customer success is a cross-functional effort between sales, support, service and product focused on long term strategies. It helps clients adapt their business success based on new expectations, market trends and more - making it directly proportional to the success of the client.
An effective customer success strategy builds loyalty, reduces the risk of customer attrition and increases opportunities to boost revenue.
How we measure the success of our clients.
Healthy customer success is when we've successfully helped a client achieve their goals and outcomes through the adoption of Plentific. We eschew a blank-sheet approach to client relationship management with a critical discovery phase.
As the first step of the onboarding journey, the discovery phase involves listening to clients to better understand their business, uncover their challenges and align with their objectives. A nuanced understanding of the client's needs, including their KPIs and success metrics, helps us align internal success metrics for each of them and unify our efforts.
CASE STUDY: Combating a backlog of 6000 jobs
In September 2022, we helped a key client deal with a large backlog of works. Our success team formulated a plan that included managed services (managing work orders for the client) alongside providing the client support for resource planning.
We worked with the client to understand what core functionalities their team required and began a phased approach
Phases included discovery (listening and learning about the client's goals); scoping (capturing changes and requirements); training (including a smaller rollout) and adoption (full Plentific adoption into BAU)
We grew the clients team from seven to 29 members, creating champions within the team so new starters would have effective support to build themselves up
In early October, jobs being posted on Plentific by the client surpassed 1000/ week
How we adapt to customer needs.
Our customer success team prides itself on end-to-end account management. Taking a holistic approach is especially important in cases where clients are undergoing change management within their organisation or are adapting their strategy when merging with another property provider. Our team revisits and re-formulates strategies alongside them to align closely with their needs during these times.
Similarly, during the global pandemic, when operations and property managers were not able to work from their usual office environment, customer success adapted its processes to bolster clients' efforts in offering their residents a reliable, resilient service, despite COVID-related limitations. This included virtual support sessions, digital training academies and platform tutorials.
Customer success isn't just focused on new clients and nurtures existing client relationships to ensure they meet their objectives and go from strength to strength with Plentific.
CASE STUDY: Completing over 8000 works for new safety regulations
A long-standing client of ours required works pertaining to smoke and carbon monoxide alarms to be bulk uploaded onto our platform, so they could be addressed ahead of changing regulations. Given the time sensitive nature of this, the success team took an agile approach, making short turnaround times a priority in the project plan.
We worked with the product team at Plentific to create custom tags for these jobs so they could be easily identified
Our team also put together a new 'service type' for these tasks on Plentific, to make reporting on these jobs easier
All jobs were assigned a due date in keeping with the new legislation, so none would go amiss
The success team helped adapt Plentific's flexible supply chain to establish a 'mini marketplace' focused solely on completing these jobs
All jobs were successfully completed ahead of schedule and to client's satisfaction.
Our recipe for your success.
Our happiest clients are our biggest advocates and supporters. Having a greater customer impact helps us reinforce our company ethos and ensure that housing providers are getting all the support they need to deliver the best impact for their end users - tenants.
Providing a single recipe for success would oversimplify our focus on personalised solutions, however, here are some of the fundamentals we pride ourselves on.
Streamlined onboarding processes: Plentific's user experience feels intuitive from the outset owing to years of experience and feedback from our clients. We work hard and listen to feedback to make the platform experience simple and seamless.
Simple to follow guides: Plentific Academy features quick, step-by-step video guides narrated by our very own customer success team.
Sharing market resources: Whilst our customers stay well-informed of industry news and trends, we supplement their knowledge with white papers, eBooks, case studies and research reports to give them a unique perspective on areas we specialise in, including digital transformation, operational excellence, flexible procurement and sustainable supply chain management.
Working with every touchpoint: Our success team works closely with every function of the business to ensure there's no doubling up when engaging with customers on multiple levels. This also helps us better visualise insights and data on customer needs.
Suggesting best practices and reinforcing success: Working closely with customers of all sizes for over a decade helps us understand and navigate them towards industry best practices for key areas of property operations such as repair diagnostics, reporting, contractor management, compliance and more.
