ProSupport Plus for Infrastructure is changing the way Dell customers look at saving time and increasing availability for their business applications and workloads. The ProSupport Plus Infrastructure helps our clients get the most value from their investments by leveraging groundbreaking support expertise, technical acumen and AI-powered proactive insights. On this way of focusing on the benefits for the client, Customer Success is the logical step forward to help our clients get the most value from their investments.
In this edition of our leadership interviews, Kirk Scott, VP of Account Management Services, sat down to chat with Silvia de la Cagiga and Quinten Ockers, Technical Customer Success Managers (Technical CSM) at Dell Technologies, on what it means to be a Technical CSM and how our customers are going to get the best experience ever with us.
Silvia de la Cagiga: Could you explain what customer success is all about?
Kirk Scott: Technical Customer Success is a robust set of practices related to methodologies around making customers successful. It has been around for a while, but the evidence is in and it is a far superior model. When the customer has a need, we know what our capabilities are across the company.
One of the hallmarks of Customer Success is we’re not just an extension of technical support.
Customer Success at Dell Technologies is our future because our customers’ environments are technically becoming more complex. We must be on top of understanding our customers’ environments proactively, the health of them, and how our services, tools and solutions are interoperating in their environment. With the focus of our Technical CSM on the technical environment of every customer, we are prepared for the next level of service delivery.
De la Cagiga: Is there a difference between this methodology and traditional customer support?
Scott: The direct answer to the question is Customer Success is how you manage customers and focus on the customer’s perspective and what the customer needs to be successful.
This means that we do things in a way that are quite different than traditional account management. Account management, depending on where you’ve been in your past, might have been quite closely related to support.
We would have the relationship and the trusted partner status. Technical customer success is not an extension of customer support in terms of fixing problems. Technical CSM will take care of the customers, ask what business outcomes they’re looking for to be successful, and help them achieve those outcomes.
Quinten Ockers: I want to compare where we came from to where we are with the Technical Customer Success Manager (Technical CSM), what is the difference?
Scott: While Service Account Managers (SAMs) were trusted service advisors who navigated the complex world of Dell services, Technical CSMs are the trusted partners who steer the organization to make the customer’s business outcomes successful.
Where SAMs held monthly meetings and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to discuss service history, Technical CSMs, as trusted partners, lead technical discussions on business outcomes, talk about proactive health recommendations for their IT-environment, and ensure alignment to the customer’s business objectives.
We’re ultimately moving SAMs from the role of helping customers navigate through the complexity of services to being a champion:
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- to proactively optimize IT-infrastructure health,
- monitor the customer base and
- help customers remove obstacles that prevent them from being successful with Dell Technologies.
Ockers: So, when we talk about where we would like to be, and on this journey of adoption, what should be our next focus?
Scott: The typical method of Customer Success is the LAER model: Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew.
In the first phase, Land is more like a sales force that lands the business. This is not our job for greenfield business, but clearly the job for our Technical CSMs in existing customer relationships. They are very often in the middle of new business because they are firmly integrated there. But the rest of these letters also have a meaning for us.
We are already pretty good at customer Retention (renewals). We know, for example, that we achieved the benchmark for Customer Success in the industry. Around 95% of our PSP customers remain loyal to us year after year, far more than from the rest of the company’s base.
But I think we really need to focus on Adoption.
When I talk about adoption, most of our customers will probably think it’s about connecting to secure connect gateway.
But adoption has nothing to do with connectivity to Dell Technologies tools. Adoption means that the customer uses the solutions, the technology they have bought from us, for their intended use cases, to achieve the desired Return on Investment (ROI) and business outcomes. That is what adoption is all about.
It means they use the equipment the way they want it and the way it should be, on time, on schedule and on budget. We need to spend a lot of time this year figuring out how we can do that globally in a standardized, best practice way.
There are a million things that can go wrong in our customers’ environments, but there are probably 20 that are most common in every solution.
We are at a turning point because although complexity continues to increase, tools such as Dell AIOps are improving our visibility into the customers’ environment enabling us to monitor their environment and proactively recommend changes that maximize reliability and reduce downtime.
Ockers: With the focus of Adoption in mind, ProSupport Plus for Infrastructure will be more orientated toward ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes and Return on Investment (ROI) with the Dell Technologies they have purchased.
If you want to find out more, You can find more information on ProSupport Plus for Infrastructure by downloading the datasheet.
