BLOG
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| Richard Jonkhof | Dick Heerkens | Tomas Salfischberger |
| Strategy Consultant | Lead Consultant | Co-founder |
Helping brands create meaningful relationships with their customers is at the core of everything we do. We’re proud of the way our Journey Orchestration Platform enables marketers to leverage their first-party data and become more customer centric and data-driven. And that’s why we prefer to put the spotlight on the successful stories of our customers rather than talking about ourselves.
In addition to offering technology that enables brands to put more focus on their customers, however, we are also constantly working to make our own way of working as customer-centric as possible. After receiving our recent 10/10 CSAT score, we knew for sure that the changes we’ve been making were really hitting home. So, in this article, we’re breaking from the norm and talking about ourselves in order to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at our own customer-centric B2B SaaS strategy.
To tell you more about our approach, we sat down with Customer Strategy Consultant, Richard Jonkhof, Lead Consultant Dick Heerkens, and our Co-Founder Tomas Salfischberger.
FAST AND AGILE ONBOARDING PROCESS
For over 10 years now, we’ve been working with hundreds of leading marketers, all from a range of industries, and with a diversity of business goals and ambitions. But despite their differences, they’ve always have one thing in common: they are eager to get to work with our platform as soon as the contract is signed.
And that’s why getting our customers ready and putting their first use case live is our main priority in the first phase of the onboarding process.
When we start working with a new customer, we apply our standardized onboarding methodology, consisting of three parallel tracks:
- Business onboarding: Define the use case roadmap and train the core team.
- Technical onboarding: Our technical consultants create the initial technical configuration, define properties and engagements, connect the existing marketing channels, and integrate the back-end systems such as CRM.
- Use case delivery: Build, test, and launch the first use cases.
This process has been part of our methodology for a couple of years and has proven to be highly effective. Of course, every process can be made faster and more efficient, and we wanted to see what we could improve.
So 12 months ago, our Customer Services team went to work investigating opportunities to improve our onboarding process. The result of their exhaustive research? A fully updated onboarding process based on SCRUM methodology. Here’s how it works:
Optimized SaaS onboarding process based on SCRUM
The first change that came with our updated onboarding process was that our customers and their dedicated consultants would work in blocks of bi-weekly sprints, which would be reviewed every four weeks. Each onboarding project would be divided into daily tasks, and everything would be planned and published on a shared team project management board.
We also set up a special chat environment for the onboarding process so we could easily communicate with our customer’s core team throughout. Transparency and communication are key!
Why agile onboarding works for SaaS
Simply put: being agile allowed us to much more easily deliver visible high-quality results in a shorter amount of time. Both our team and our customers know exactly what needs to be done at any given moment — along with who is responsible for each task, and where they stand in the onboarding process.
An additional benefit of working in sprints is that we can be flexible and avoid show-stopping dependencies. For instance, if a team member has a planned holiday during the onboarding, we can switch tasks and continue making progress without delaying the process.
As a result, we are now able to onboard new customers 12-15 weeks after the initial kick-off.
DELIVERING VALUE AND SETTING UP FOR SUCCESS
After the onboarding phase, our Customer Services team continues to support our customer’s core CDP team with initiatives that will help them get the most out of the Relay42 Platform.
On a technical level: We continue expanding their marketing capabilities by adding more channels, integrating more data sources, and further implementing our ID management capabilities.
On a strategic level: Our dedicated consultants guide the marketing team in defining their roadmap and selecting the use cases that will have the highest impact in achieving their strategic marketing objectives.
This includes organizing regular use case workshops and inspirational sessions. During the workshops, the dedicated Relay42 consultant and the core team work together to define/refine KPIs and build complex customer journeys. In some cases, we’ve been able to invite two customers to meet up in a joint session to share best practices and learn from one another.
Helping Relay42 customers grow their data marketing skills
Of course, onboarding is really just the beginning. Ultimately, we want our customers to be able to easily ideate and create customer journeys in our platform without our help. In the past, we would meet up with customers frequently to host workshops and offer advanced training. Of course, with the pandemic in 2020, that became impossible — and we had to get creative. That’s when we started building our online academy, which we were excited to launch at the beginning of 2021.
The goal of the Relay42 Academy is to help our customers and partners get familiar with the functionalities of the Relay42 platform so they can create impactful customer journeys to achieve their marketing ambitions.
Preview of the Relay42 Academy
The courses in the Relay42 Academy program are available for free to all Relay42 users and can be taken whenever and wherever suits them. After completing the course, participants receive an official Relay42 certificate to add to their professional achievements.
PREPARING RELAY42 CUSTOMERS FOR 1ST-PARTY DATA MARKETING
It’s no secret that marketers are facing some huge challenges. Whole markets are shifting as the pandemic continues to leave its mark, and consumer privacy continues to heavily influence the way consumers want to (and are allowed to) be approached by brands. Not to mention the demise of the 3rd party cookie.
All of this adds up to increasing pressure for businesses to develop and roll out a first-party-data first strategy, putting customer-provided data at the heart of activities throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
So our team went to work developing the Relay42 First-Party Data Program. The goal of the program is to help our customers adapt to the new cookieless world and kick-start their first-party data strategy, fully aligned with the current possibilities and challenges for each organization.
The future of marketing without third-party cookies was also the focus of our 2020 Customer Conference, where we gathered industry leaders to share best practices around the topic of identity management. Check out a summary of our 2020 Customer Conference and watch video presentations on the topic in this article >>
GENUINE TEAM COLLABORATION
The truth is, 
For us, building meaningful relationships is about creating mutual trust and forming a strong bond between our team and the customer’s core team. From our dedicated consulting teams to building our product roadmap — the needs of our customers are at the core of everything we do.
It’s this close connection with our customers that drives us to keep improving our product, optimizing our processes, and ultimately delivering a better customer experience and a stronger performance.
Are you interested in learning how a CDP can help make your own organization more customer-centric?
Watch our recent webinar with our CEO and co-founder.
