What is customer success?
Creating an intranet for your organization is an exciting experience.
Teams will finally have a digital workplace to share ideas and collaborate, promoting a culture that encourages personal and professional growth that benefits your company, exponentially!
Your HR and IT departments spend months researching intranet solutions. After finally deciding on the “right” fit, they spend months implementing the new platform and launch it with high hopes.
“This is going to be great! We finally have a digital workplace for our employees that improves collaboration and promotes personal and professional growth!” High fives all around!
A few months in, everything is going well. Your employees are digging it but they want better ways to communicate and engage with each other, so you talk to your intranet provider and they offer to integrate with Slack.
Three weeks later, this new integration crashes the system and efforts to increase collaboration have failed. Your intranet is down and IT can’t address the underlying issue because they don’t have access to the code. You’re CSM can’t help either so they create a support ticket for you and say, “You should have a response in 3-4 days.”
Is this acceptable? Agora doesn’t think so, and neither should you.
Unfortunately, this exact scenario recently happened to one of our clients. However, because they partnered with us, we were able to get our tech team on it and had them up and running almost immediately.
Moral of the story: If you’re looking to implement a new intranet solution, or improve the one you already have, talk to us first!
Schedule a free consultation right now and we’ll help you determine the steps you need to take to ensure you get the outcome you want.
Is Your CSM Doing Enough?
"How is your relationship with your current Customer Success Manager (CSM)?"
The room fell into a silence, followed by an awkward laugh. Their response was telling, “It’s fine, but…”
The ‘but’ hung in the air, signaling the unspoken frustrations. They confessed that their CSM often lacked contextual understanding of their issues, leading to prolonged resolution times. It echoed an unfortunate truth that a simple question could sometimes spiral into weeks of waiting for an answer. Moreover, their CSMs, despite being present in meetings, seemed to be running on a hamster wheel of routine questions – lacking fresh ideas, updates, or roadmaps. Essentially, the role seemed to be that of a scorekeeper of issues rather than a driver of solutions. Far from being an isolated incident, this frustrating narrative is a widespread issue in the industry.
After your intranet is launched, the relationship you have with your Customer Success Manager (CSM) can greatly influence your firm’s growth trajectory. However, a common issue with teams is the lack of context and depth in their relationship with their CSMs.
Struggles can include:
- Lack enough technical knowledge to answer questions and resolve issues, resulting in waiting weeks for technical support to respond to a support
- Lack of in depth knowledge of the roadmap of the intranet to help you see upcoming features and updates
- Lack of meaningful strategy for implementing new updates, ideas or features to help your team
Because of these challenges, there is a crucial time after launching your digital employee experience where help from an outside consulting team will enable you to align your company needs with what your intranet company can do for you.
Maximize Success and Streamline Ongoing Support
From understanding what to demand from your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to managing the complexities of support tickets, Agora Consulting Group specializes in implementation services, customer success, and ongoing support, so you can reach your goals.
As experts in this field, Agora Consulting Group can swiftly navigate these intricate tasks, saving your company countless hours, if not days or weeks. We’ve established relationships with our partner’s internal teams, and we’re armed with the essential knowledge to anticipate the questions they’ll have and the answers they’ll need. By knowing exactly what an engineer is looking for in a support ticket, we can accelerate the resolution process.
It’s not uncommon for companies to find themselves constantly creating support tickets. And some intranet systems don’t even give customers access to support until after they launch. Oftentimes, issue resolution spirals into complex tasks that require specialized knowledge, like providing HAR files (recordings of page loading) and screen recordings. Agora Consulting Group can assist with issue resolution during your implementation and expedite issue resolution post launch.
Getting Design Assistance
In today’s digital-driven marketplace, creating a cohesive and engaging intranet experience is vital for businesses. The value of design support is fundamental in curating compelling digital landscapes. Have you thought through how you will tweak your templates during a rebrand, or how to equip your content creators with new sections?
Here are some things to think about when it comes to help for design work:
Template Tweaking
Often, companies have enthusiastic content creators who may need guidance to align their creative ideas with the brand’s visual identity. This is where tweaking a page or a template comes in handy. Agora can make this happen!
Rebranding
It’s not unusual for a company to undergo rebranding and need expert assistance in this transformative phase. Contrary to intranet vendors, who offer rigid designs with limited flexibility, Agora provides the ability to customize and to rebrand.
CSS Changes
While products like LumApps, Simpplr, and Mango empower you with CSS and custom design capabilities, they implicitly shift the risk to you. Any support release could potentially disrupt your design, leaving you in a bind to find a designer to mend the code.
Agora Consulting Group, is equipped to handle such scenarios seamlessly, ensuring that your digital presence remains consistent and appealing, even in the face of unanticipated technical challenges.
Getting Technical Help: When Your IT Team Has Moved on to Other Projects
In the aftermath of launching a company’s intranet, the technical resources at your company are often sharply reduced. The project’s technical teams usually roll off, assuming that the solution’s “no-code” or “low-code” claim will hold up. However, real-world experiences often don’t play out this smoothly, leaving you struggling without the help you need.
After launch, unfortunately, you’ll discover many tech-related issues within the platform that are beyond our understanding. These issues demand expert resolution—something that a typical Customer Success Manager (CSM) might not be equipped for. For instance, let’s consider the complexities involved in software integration. On paper, integrations seem straightforward—you simply press a few buttons, fill in some information, and voila, you’re integrated. But in reality, it’s a different ball game altogether. It requires extra privileges and in-depth understanding of both systems being integrated.
Recently, one of our clients integrated their intranet with Slack. However, the integration unexpectedly broke and the team, including the CSM, was left wondering why this happened. It’s scenarios like these that emphasize the need for a more technically proficient resource, rather than relying solely on a CSM.
These seemingly simple issues can become significant roadblocks when left to a CSM alone. Especially if your tech team is tied up with other projects and unavailable for immediate help.
This is where a consultant like Agora steps in, providing a consistent tech resource to address these issues promptly. With regular meetings and unlimited email support, Agora ensures faster issue resolution. Unlike a typical CSM, who may lack deep platform knowledge, Agora’s team is composed of technical experts who understand the intricacies of the platform. While a good CSM can help with aspects like engagement and adoption, Agora bridges the gap when it comes to more technical needs.
Launching your mobile app should not be an afterthought?
Often, companies underestimate the significance of a mobile application while launching their intranet, regarding it as an afterthought rather than an integral part of their digital strategy. Rolled out post-launch, the mobile application usually receives less attention than the desktop version. This could lead to potential issues, especially when a considerable portion of the workforce relies heavily on mobile devices for their daily tasks.
During launch, the focus usually tilts towards ensuring that the mobile application is not broken at launch rather than optimizing it for an enhanced user experience. This is particularly true for platforms like LumApps, which primarily cater to office workers. On the other hand, some intranet vendors like Mango Apps, with their frontline-first approach, tend to put more emphasis on their mobile offerings, understanding that many of their customers use iPads, shared workstations, or mobile devices.
For a successful mobile app launch, it’s about understanding its possibilities, capabilities, and the audience it serves. Does your company mostly have desk workers or do you have a significant number of frontline workers or frequent travelers? What is your intended audience and what information should and can be available for mobile consumption? It’s crucial to create content and layouts that are easily consumable for the intended persona. A lot of these decisions could be made better with a consulting team on your side to help during the implementation process.
At Agora, we help teams know when and how to launch their mobile apps. Mobile app pre-launch planning is ideal, but realistically, the focus is often on getting the platform launched first, and the mobile application can follow. Due to time constraints, mobile applications are oftentimes a post-launch activity and an effective strategy to rejuvenate interest in the intranet while ensuring the mobile app is not just an unconsidered add-on but a valuable tool that enhances the overall intranet experience.
Mobile App pre-launch planning is an Agora service offering which increases platform adoption, usage, and overall success.
Understanding and Applying Your Digital Workplace Analytics
Above and beyond a CSM, it’s critical to have a guide for interpreting your metrics, shedding light on user behavior patterns, and understanding areas of success as well as those in need of improvement. For example, we may notice that your HR department exhibits strong peer-to-peer engagement. We analyze the reasons behind this success – is it the content, or perhaps the enablement processes, that are driving this?
Meanwhile, we might identify that your finance department was not adequately enabled, indicating a need for a dedicated enablement session. Our approach is not just about reading the analytics; it’s about understanding the why behind the numbers, and using this knowledge to drive strategies that ensure successes and address shortfalls.
With Agora, your analytics become more than just numbers – they become the compass guiding your digital workplace’s future development and success.
In conclusion, hiring Agora Consulting Group will ensure a successful launch, streamline maintenance and ongoing support, and aid in your ability to deploy use cases correlated with current and future technical capabilities. With regular meetings and unlimited email support, Agora ensures faster issue resolution compared to a typical Customer Success Manager. Agora’s design support ensures that your digital presence remains consistent and appealing, even during unexpected technical challenges. And, in-depth insights into your intranet’s analytics to help you understand user behavior patterns to identify areas of success and needs for improvement.