 Okay so welcome everybody to this session about aligning your customers and product success in a SaaS world. My name is Evelyn Schutt. I'm working for Google Gorilla and I've been working as a scrum master for almost four years but since a few months I'm in a new position. I'm now a community consultant for OpenSocial and the reason I'm having this new position is has everything to do with what I'm talking about today so it will make more sense in the next slides what I do and why I do it. So in 2016 Google Gorilla has started to build their own SaaS product and that was basically the moment that we shifted from an agency to a more product focused company and this session is about how we had to change our approach in how we deal with our customers how we service them and because as I said I was a scrum master before so I had to work with our customers on a daily basis we had we worked in sprints so we had a really extensive relationship with our customers we talked about them about feature wishes and they help us testing and stuff like that so we really had a good extensive relationship with them but when you're selling SaaS your ultimate goal is that you have a very large customer base and you're actually servicing your customers with with less contact moments so actually well the least as you can get so because also they are using the same product so it's a standard product there's nothing customized specific for this customer so the way you have to deal with them is a totally different thing so I will take you through some of the lessons we learned in the past few months actually and things we need to change in our workflow and the way we talk to our clients but first let me give you a very brief introduction of the product because over social it's called and it's a community platform and it's a platform where people can collaborate share knowledge organize events and it's really suitable for an internet or for like a volunteer community it can be even a really big one we serve a lot of NGOs but can also be like your local soccer club for instance and the reason we built this product is because we had the most expertise in this in this yeah in this area and it's also really the next big thing I think even Dries told it in his keynote so we're really on track and open social comes in a few flavors actually three so the first one is our distribution and so it's completely open sourced can be downloaded and as you can see by the numbers it's really active it's been downloading been downloaded quite some times and we also maintain it on the daily basis and we still are improving it and building new features for it the second thing that we have this is our sauce product so that we call it our basic product so it's the standard products you get for an amount that you pay per month so 95 euros per month 200 users and you get some extra specific features on top of the distribution and we also have other pricing plans when you exceed 100 users and the third flavor is our enterprise flavor because we also have customers who have very specific wishes and bigger wishes than the standard product so we built it on top of the basic product but this session is really about our SAS product so the software as a service part because that is also our main focus so in the beginning of this year I think it was April we launched the SAS product and we have now a fully automated via version which means you can go to our website at get over social.com you can fill in some credentials you grab some coffee and in the meantime your your platform is being installed I think it takes 15 minutes it's hosted on platform.sh and yeah you can immediately start using it invite users create some content whatever you want so that's pretty cool I guess and it's also our first step into this big big SAS world so far so good we thought and yes the technical part is in place and it's really good and we're really proud of that but there were two main challenges we had to face and the first challenge was conversion because when you download our platform you first get a 30 day free trial because you can try it out you can really get to know the platform and see this if this is the perfect fit for you and when you think yes this is what I need you fill in your credit card details and you can start using it and you will be charged every month for it so signups were pretty good we had about 30 signups for the trial version but converting them into paying customers that was really hard and because we had automated everything like the entire process we were also not really in contact with them so we had basically no clue why they didn't convert yeah the other challenge that was how to retain our customers so once they are actually on board they are paying customer how do we retain them and it's also a bit of a problem maybe within a product itself because building communities setting it up inviting your users that's one thing but if you really want to have a healthy community that is supporting itself users are very active they're creating content that's totally different thing I think it then can take up to 12 months on average before it's really healthy and it takes a lot of efforts of community managers so I think it can even be a full-time job in the larger communities so that's really really a challenge we have to face so up till the beginning of this year we had focused on technique so the product and its features automation even the updates are automated so with only one push of a button we update all our SaaS instances but we knew that now we had to shift our focus from the more technical point to the more customer facing issues I'm going to tell you four challenges for tips for things we changed but before I do that I want to make sure that yeah that's understood that customer success is not just one team that really focuses on it at least in our company I think it should be really a culture because all these teams are working on a product and they should be yeah they all should be involved in the customer success part so if you look at the marketing team they're already involved even if the customer is actually a paying customer because it's really important that we have documentation stuff in place that when they have to convince other stakeholders that they can show something and also in the buying process and the product team it's also really important in the research phase because they need to be really transparent on their roadmap because okay maybe at this point a certain feature is not in there but if you really be transparent about your roadmap you can show when it's coming or maybe it's not coming then this is also something that in their research is yeah really important to know of course yeah so we are working with an entire company towards customer success but the four things that I will show you now is really yeah related to the things that I was involved and I'm in the in the community team so it's mainly about onboarding and retaining them let's see the first one is about onboarding and we have actually two ways we look at it because first we have to get them on board they have to become a paying customer out of this trial period so yeah again we set up this 30-day trial but they didn't convert automatically so we made a change in there and what we do now is we actually put on our website that they can request the trial so they leave their their phone number and their email and the first thing we do is we call them and we get to know them a bit we ask especially what they're looking for an open social and what are their needs and based on that we set up a live demo it takes about 30 minutes we try to lower the barriers as much as we can but on the other hand customers need also need to be a bit dedicated to to get to know us as a platform and as a company so in 30 minutes we show them around we set up the platform a little bit in their look and feel so that they can relate to it and if they're still interested then they get their 30-day trial and it's also a great way to already be in touch with your customer you can address some early questions but also for us maybe at the end of the demo they're like okay this is not really what we're looking for okay I do not need this this this free trial but it's also available to us because we know then and we can ask them what what are you missing and it's really good feedback for us yeah when we change this this process it was in august up till then the designers were pretty high but it dropped but we don't think that's really bad because yeah we see these trials that are really dedicated and they are really a good match with our product and yeah they are like higher value in our opinion so this is it looks less like 10 a month but if we can convert six of them every month that's really awesome of course yeah the other way of onboarding is when they're really on board and they are this paying customer you don't want to let them lose and think okay now everything will go by itself and yeah we'll get them their money every month no we're still guiding them through the first phases of running their community but we also really checking how they use the platform do they use all the features in there are they neglecting certain parts or yeah every every time we do a new release we send out release notes but sometimes we learn that it's not really that they don't really read it so we also check okay are they using these new features or do we need to show them around so that's all like on one contact but of course we also need to yeah provide a lot of documentation for the cases that yeah they need quick answers so that's also something that we're really yeah dedicate and we work hard on that I think this seems like a lot of efforts and we've also been thinking of yeah automating this process like in the tool itself like building some kind of wizard that lead them step-by-step through the process it's still something on our mind but we took a step back and we're now really talking to them so this is also a great way to learn what this wizard should do in the end so that you're actually building the things they need so a second thing is yeah that you have to position yourself as a as a thought leader because it's not only that you're providing a tool for them if you can also show that you're really into the business that they're looking for that in our case that you're really into community building that you can help them engaging in their platform make sure everybody's active that is most likely that they will choose for you instead of a tool that doesn't provide that and how we do that is different ways so first of all we start blogging about it and we also market this in different social channels of course and I think we blog a lot about it because you have to be out there and you have to yeah you have to reach them over and over again so blogging blogging blogging we also create some more extensive white papers where we give them more in yeah in-depth advice on how to run your community and I think the third and most important thing is that we have set up a service where we consult them in building their communities so really talk to them on a monthly basis we help them set goals monitor these goals and also reach these goals and in the end yeah our goal is of course that their community is paying off and that they renew their contracts over and over and over every month third thing is that you have to listen to your customers because yeah you you get a lot of feedback from them and sometimes it's feedback on features you already have but needs improvement or new feature wishes that they have yeah you have to really gather and store this data because it's most important for us and not only from customers but also the sales team who talks to leads to these trials to to in other conversations all this data needs to be stored and we do that in a way in a tool it's called receptive and this is a nice way of showing that this is something we have automated because we started out in spreadsheets in and in our head but our customer base is growing our leads are are yeah growing as well so the spreadsheet is not enough anymore and this is where we decided to choose for tool receptive as I said which is really awesome and I'm really really big fan of it because customers can get their own account can submit feature suggestions to us and can also set their priorities as you can see on the right against each other and then other nice things that if other customers submit feature suggestions that they can vote on them as well and the same as the product team add some features in here that they can vote on it say man I don't want this or yeah this is a nice feature I wanted and this is my priority and they can also see our roadmap in here so that's part of being transparent again and then the other part is is how we can handle this data because we can create all kinds of smart lists as they call it here with the top priorities and you can look at all of our customers we can look at our customers with a high value or with a low value or or leads so this is really valuable input and we use this on a daily base we check new suggestions and we also use this in our roadmap meetings so we really try to listen and build what our customers need and that's a really big thing for us and it's really handy tool and last thing is measure because in the end you want to know if all this effort you're putting in there and talking to your customers and all these hours are really paying off and but this is also an whole other thing in the size world because you can measure like everything but where do you start and what's what we do is we look at the maturity models that are out there maybe a bit too detailed but I don't have enough time to explain everything about it but it basically is a model which shows the different stages a company can go through from a startup phase to a more emerging phase to scaling phase where you have a really large customer base and on the top it it shows on different pillars what kind of steps you can take if you are going through these phases so in this case it's the metrics and this is also how we addressed it so we said okay what did we do so far we have calculated our monthly and annual recurring revenue we have also counted our customers which was pretty easy we could do it with our two hands at the time but then we said okay now it's growing we need to know more and on different aspects also so on the top you see the core success metrics they tell you something about the amount of customers of the percentage of customers you are able to retain or that are leaving you and the growth in that revenue retention rate is about the revenue that you're able to retain every month or that you may be expanded and on top of that we also need to know how our product is used so we started out small because you can track everything there but we built some analytics inside our SaaS instances where we can track their active users and amount of content created all kinds of things so that we actually know that the platform is used or not and I think last thing is really important because we also measure the customer happiness and because all the figures on top could look really good people are not leaving you platform is pretty active but in the end of six out of ten customers is unhappy your figures could look totally different next month of course so we also track the happiness of the customers and you can do it really difficult you can also start really simple that the person who is in most contact with them that they can can rate the customer in the way they're happy can be really simple like that but these three figures together says well a lot about your customer base so our main lessons in this SaaS journey is and don't think you can automate everything from the start but get in touch with your client talk to them take them by the hand I got it a feedback and measure see if you're doing okay if you need to adapt and I don't think like automating from the start is really bad but it can just be tricky because you're not sure yet if you're automating the correct correct things you're not sure how they're using your product at this point so before I go to the questions some formalities would really nice if you could join a code sprints on Friday there's also a code sprint of open social so if you want to check out our product or even help us out fix some bugs and you're welcome and our tag line is make your people bloom maybe you've seen them already but at the door there is a small present small sunflower you can grow it and you can share your results on Twitter with us maybe you'll get a small price if you have the largest one so take them when you leave questions as in users you mean it's not about the amount of users I guess it's about active users but we also see it it's called the community lifecycle because you start out and your community managers are running the place they are created they're the one who creating content but in the end what you want is that the rest of the users is taking over and start so when that is happening then you're talking about this healthy community so and that's to reach that so that the community managers are just more like facilitating and and not like fully a full-time job creating content and pulling people to the platform that's the moment when you can speak of a healthy community in the community yeah we have a lot of different communities so we have smaller ones we have larger ones and the larger ones have about 50,000 users but we also serve communities that only have 30 users so that's really not a one answer to that yeah in open social yes it's really yeah we started this project because we also have built a community for green wire of a green piece it's called Greenpeace green wire and in there we have 100,000 users so that's something we want to reach with open social as well so 50,000 is already pretty nice and proud yeah that's a good question we're also a bit yeah a bit trying out still because we also are like experimenting with our pricing model but services could read be really interested to extend your business indeed and I think that's also something we're really focusing on now especially because it's also pretty important in our product but I think services could become even even bigger indeed the percentage I think it's 50-50 at the moment yeah yeah yeah yeah because the product is still a bit in the early phase so it can lack some features in cases so that's why this enterprise flavor is there and there's an entire dedicated team who works on building these enterprises yeah yeah that's also a good question because that's our enterprises they the basis is the same so if we add new feature to the to the SaaS version like private messages maybe then the enterprise customers will get it too indeed but so that goes like without any extra costs but sometimes we build like a very specific module that we don't want in the SaaS version we don't put it in the SaaS version but we do upsell it to other customers so it will not be in the standard products but yeah we upsell it in the beginning yes and now it's it's it's doubled so we need a tool because we can't use our hands no so yeah it's still an early phase we're now five months on the road and yeah it's a tough market I guess but we're still really dedicated to it and yeah we will make it work I think maybe one of the tech guys can answer it I'm not sure about the time and if there's somebody else behind me like a next session I think time is up so thanks for attending guys and take your presents