Digital Transformation: Rallyware’s Customer Experience Team’s Insights

Today, superb customer experience is more important than ever – according to research from Accenture, 50% of global consumers have said that the pandemic has caused them to rethink their purpose and re-evaluate what is important in life. For the team at Rallyware, we are cognizant of the need to be fluid, to adapt in order to meet changing consumer expectations, to grow and evolve alongside our customers. Passionate and committed to delivering the best possible experience to our customers upon each and every interaction, how could we shift our own strategy to go above and beyond our customer’s expectations?

With this in mind, we are thrilled to announce Rallyware’s new Customer Experience (CX) leaders who will put us on the path towards delivering the best-in-class customer experience, while leveraging leading industry best practices and a data-driven model that is tailored for our customers. Here, we chat with Mohan Natraj, Rallyware’s newly minted Vice President of Global Customer Experience, along with the rest of the team – Christina Olsen, Head of Customer Success and Victoria Nagornaya, Head of Customer Experience Operations – to find out what all-star customer success means to them, and what’s in store for 2022. 

1. Congratulations on your new positions! What a great way to end the year, and begin the new one. Let’s begin by exploring the best practices for customer success. What are some of these best practices that you adhere to?

Christina Olsen: A general rule of thumb is that all aspects of [customer success] thrive when there is empathy for the customer, having that understanding of what the customer needs and whether or not we can provide it. Being able to put yourself into the shoes of the customer is a common thread across various areas – whether this may be support or implementation. The handoff with the sales team is also critical, it is important to have a good connection with this team, to glean as much information as possible in order to begin with a strong foundation. Our team will then have a kickoff call with customers to ask questions such as what are their pain points? How will they use this tool to solve these pain points? Who are the right individuals to engage, to ensure that we have all information that we need? That initial connection that we make with the customer is key. 

Victoria Nagornaya: Having a deep understanding of the customers’ business and their goals for implementing Rallyware is critical to our success in helping our customers grow. 

Mohan Natraj: We also have to ask: what does success really mean to the customer? While customers are using our solution for a particular need, we need to strongly grasp their intended outcome, whether that may be to gain revenue, customer satisfaction or more website visitors. As Victoria mentioned, we also need to understand the type of business that the customer is in, as they may be using our product for a very specific need, and this will dictate how we service them, as well as inform the overall customer journey map. 

2. Why is delivering outstanding customer success so vital to the team at Rallyware?

CO: Retention is the answer – while it is a simple word, it is such a complex problem. I am a self-defined retention nerd! The more awareness we have when it comes to our customers, the more we can keep them and nurture them, and that comes from having world-class customer success – caring about and understanding their problems, which all goes back to the concept of empathy, as I discussed above.

3. Digital transformation is essential today – this is one of Rallyware’s core strengths. As a CX team, how do you harness digital transformation, new tools and technologies to meet the needs of the modern customer?

CO: One of the ways that we are doing this is by meeting the customer where they are. Rather than asking customers to work within our toolbox, we ask them ‘what does your digital footprint look like?’ Whether they may use Slack or WhatsApp, we adapt to try to meet them where they are, and if they are not as far along, we might encourage them to join us in the world of Slack, for instance. That also happens as we are talking to our internal product team, looking for the places where that transformation can continue all the way into our platform.

Some companies may prefer to use Facebook, some communicate via WhatsApp, so we build some of those communication tools into our platform as well as into the skills that we ourselves are using. Also, our product team is pretty savvy in terms of staying current with user interface and design, and ensuring that, as the world is transforming, we are transforming as well.  

MN: Digital transformation has been accelerated during the COVID era, as many people began to think about their business processes in a different light, whether that be how they reach their customers, or how they do things internally in order to optimize their process efficiencies. The need to address changing business dynamics has forced, or has even enabled organizations to think about their business efficiencies through more of a digital lens, rather than just throwing more people at the problem, in hopes that they will be able to solve it. Digital transformation has allowed our customers to be able to make those critical decisions faster, and they also have more data to aid them in their decision making. This is where we see people leveraging metrics more and more in order to better assess their own businesses, and are therefore holding companies like Rallyware accountable for providing that level of data analysis to help them make the decisions they want. And this is exactly the business that we are in.

4. In light of recent changes and developments in the world (COVID-19, digital transformation), what new and agile approaches do you plan to bring to your approach?

CO: Internally, we are creating a structure that is allowing us to be more agile. We are going to have systems and tools in place that allow us to onboard more quickly, and have more streamlined implementations with our customers. This will allow us to react more quickly and be more aware of our customers and their needs, even when they may not be fully aware. 

VN: We are looking towards making product enhancements so that some additional aspects of our platform management can be exposed to customers, so they can use it more independently without the help of our team. We are also putting our efforts into automating some of the current operations in order to reduce time to market – whether this may be expanding the product to new geographies within the same customer account, or adding new training programs.

5. Where are we at Rallyware delivering the greatest impact in the customer success arena, and where do we plan to, in the future?

MN: Today, we are coming from a strong position of customer ownership, and a clear-minded desire to meet the customers’ outcomes. This message is firmly ingrained within all members of the CX team. Our foundation is already very strong, but there are areas where we can augment to improve our scalability, become more metrics-driven and expand our resourcing capability that we currently have, in order to meet the growth that we have in mind. For example, we are going to incorporate more metrics to figure out how we are performing at each stage. In doing so, we will gain the agility that we want to have, and this is the expectation and anticipation that we all share, heading into 2022. Can we deliver that capability, day in and day out, as we grow our customer base? 

6. Mohan recently emphasized that “the overall customer experience has to be more of a roadmap, an ongoing journey.” Can you walk us through how you would create a customer success journey map? 

VN: It’s a never-ending process – once we launch a customer, we stay with them and continue working with them closely. We continue to track the metrics that were initially outlined at the beginning of the project, to identify opportunities and areas for growth and improvements, in order to help our customers to make the most out of the platform and service that we offer. As our product evolves and we continue to add more features, we as a CX team look at new functionalities and how they can help our customers. How can they utilize all that Rallyware’s platform has to offer, to bring maximum benefits to their businesses?  

At the same time, we try to look beyond the scope of the initial project, whether that may be L&D or I&R [Incentives & Recognition] initiatives, diving deeper into their business processes to see where else we can be of help. In my experience, many business processes that we see with our customers today are quite manual, and not as efficient as they could be. This is where we can help our customers to digitize their processes, which will then help them boost their efficiency. Automating some of the business processes helps to expand their bandwidth, so they can then devote their time to other key tasks and priorities. We harness the functionalities of our platform to help our customers where we see fit.    

Is taking a data and metrics-driven approach to driving performance and productivity on your organization’s agenda for the coming year? Revisiting your current processes and procedures in order to boost efficiency? Schedule a demo to see how Rallyware’s Performance Enablement Platform, and top-notch Customer Experience team, can help take your business to new heights.