By Dorota Nosal-Butler, Head of Customer Enablement at Tuum
Imagine having a beautiful grand piano in your hall. The only problem is you have no idea how to play it. Without a maestro at the keys, it’s as good as decoration.
This, in a sense, is the challenge many SaaS provider customers face. You can be sold the most complex, layered, world-class technology that has endless possibilities when shown to you in demos… but if you can’t ultimately use the product yourself, it’ll be as good as the beautiful piano gathering dust. And you can bet those customers aren’t likely to be telling others what a fantastic product it is.
Good product is fundamental to a start-up’s success, but empowering customers to take the steering wheel and realise the most value from their investment is undoubtedly the killer strategy to making customers advocates and ensuring your product is having the greatest impact out in the wild.
The product
I joined Tuum because it’s a product I believe in. Technically, it has rich functionality that spans retail and business banking – from loans and deposits to cards and payments. It’s a modern core banking platform that can do far more than it suggests.
But what’s special is it’s built with flexibility first. Customers aren’t locked into certain features and can keep pace with market changes by adding and removing features as they need. This modularity at the heart of the product enables all the customer empowerment that surrounds Tuum’s offering and that ‘killer strategy’ of customer empowerment mentioned above.
Read on: Can a core banking system evolve with you?
SaaS customers are like snowflakes
All SaaS customers are totally unique. Where they start from and what needs they have today and in the future are all completely different and constantly evolving – even if they’re all looking to buy the same core product!
While vendors can try their best to understand these needs, it’s never going to fully match an internal perspective and understanding. This is why customer enablement is key – providing customers with thorough onboarding and transition to a new platform accelerates how quickly they are likely to adopt other aspects of the product and adjacent services and removes the risk of a product’s value fading after initial deployment.
Crucially, this is also free from the ties of the deployment of a professional service – rather than keeping customers prohibited and locked into a vendor, giving them the confidence and the knowledge to manage, upgrade and tweak the platform to their needs sets them up for success.
Customisation by configuration – not coding!
One important approach to empower customers is removing the need for deep specialist or technical expertise. If a customer is left with a whizzy product, they don’t feel fully confident in using, they won’t be able to adapt or customise which, in turn, will greatly prohibit the value it can provide them.
Providing a solution that can be relatively easily configured without the need for working on any complex code means customers are far more likely to adapt and get the most out of their products.
Level up your customers
While customer enablement is key, it should never be the case that a customer has no avenues back to a vendor to help troubleshoot or field questions. The best customer-vendor relationships should maintain the conversation, so R&D teams can benefit from insights and CS teams can foster long-term relationships.
Nurturing these relationships also has the bonus of turning customers into advocates for your products – whether that’s sharing positive word-of-mouth, contributing testimonials, or even referring prospects.
All in all, it’s a virtuous circle: more confident customers mean greater value from the product, meaning greater adoption and advocacy.
Find out how Tuum’s customer success team can empower you to start your core banking transformation. Get in touch to find out more.