Chances are, you’ve been on the receiving end of frustrating customer experience, where your service provider is unresponsive, unable to sufficiently answer your questions, or maybe just sold you a bill of goods from the beginning. And hopefully, you’ve been on the receiving end of a satisfying experience, where the service provider customizes your purchase to meet your needs, answers your questions quickly and thoughtfully, and treats you like a priority.

It’s not necessarily bad people in the frustrating scenario. It’s possible that they’re just following poor customer service practices. So, what are the best practices to serve customers in every phase of the journey?

That’s the question we’ll explore in this series.

Catch-up on Part 1 (Introduction)

Part 2: Discovery, Demo, Trial

Discovery:

In part one, Taylor wrote about the need for discovery. Our first job with a prospect is to make sure we can help, and if so, find the right package for their organization. Based on the prospect’s experience with ITSM solutions and practices, finding the right package might happen quickly, or we might get a better idea as they gain experience throughout the process.

Either way, we need to gather information about the organization, the potential use cases, and the problems they’re seeing now that led them to us.

We don’t want to tell them how great we are or how many problems we can solve. We want to listen to their specific needs, build those needs into our demonstration, and actually show them how Samanage can address those needs.

Demo:

If there’s a mutual feeling that it could be a good fit, we’ll schedule a demo. Nowhere in this process will we show powerpoint presentations about our company or graphics about our success. We want to address an individual prospect’s specific requirements, so our goal in this stage is simply to let our product speak to those requirements.

Because we’ve already collected much of the information, we can demonstrate functionality that addresses these needs. Of course, these demos might give customers ideas for more ways to use Samanage, so we encourage questions and dialogue throughout. These should not be canned presentations. Our goal is to customize the experience, so again, it’s important to listen and respond.

Trial:

Now that they’ve experienced the walkthrough, it’s a good time to let them test in real-time. The key to the trial period is that we are here to help.

If they do become a customer, they’ll have specialists to set up their environment and a support to team to troubleshoot any issues, so they are never sent into a trial on their own. Our team can help build service catalog items, setup automations, or assist with any other features they’d like to test.

Sometimes, prospects will be mid-trial by the time they get to our team. That’s fine, too. We can still demo (which might give them ideas for their trial) and help with any additional setup they need for the trial environment.

By the end of this process, everyone should have a handle on the organizational needs and how Samanage can address them. Hopefully, it’s a perfect match and we can proceed to implementation.

This post is based on most common Samanage practices. Depending on an organization’s size and needs, the customer journey may vary.

Part 3: Successful implementations to maximize customer’s experience.