This week, Totango launched Dynamic Assignment, a new innovation that taps into a fluid group of specialists throughout the enterprise and matches their expertise with the specific needs of customers. Dynamic Assignment automates this matching process, enabling enterprises to effectively address thousands of customer needs at any one time. It delivers a more personalized, precise customer success experience at scale, which can lead to increased revenues and customer retention for enterprises.
Dynamic Assignment replaces the dedicated delivery model many enterprises utilize, consisting of a fixed pool of Customer Service Managers (CSMs) dedicated to specific accounts, where existing CSMs may not have one or more of the attributes customers request:
- Precise expertise required
- Availability when needed
- Specific certifications
- Speak the customer’s language
- Located in proximity to the customer’s site
- Other criteria as determined by the customer
By replacing manual matching, enterprises are able to handle a larger number of customers’ needs.
Here I speak with David McKenney, senior vice president of Digital Advancement at Bentley Systems, which develops software solutions to accelerate project delivery and improve asset performance for public works, utilities, industrial plants, and digital cities.
Anne Ting: How have you handled customer success initiatives in the past at Bentley Systems?
David McKenney: We began an initiative almost a year ago to help customers, users in the Bentley Systems vernacular, to get more value from Bentley solutions. We know that if users don’t extract as much value as possible from our solutions, they will find a different provider.
We are a process-driven organization and it was clear to us we did not have a rigorous process for optimizing success once a new user signed on with Bentley. We knew there was expertise available in the organization we weren’t tapping into, we handled matching the expertise we did know about with customer needs manually, and we weren’t providing expertise to enough users in the timeframe they needed.
AT: How did you go about addressing this?
DM: We looked at a lot of different solutions, such as Sharepoint and several CRMs, but none of these is set up to improve customer success; for example, none enabled us to upload all user-related information into one place, which was essential for us.
We landed on Totango as a solution since it gives us the ability to automate the process of matching expertise within Bentley to address users’ needs. We don’t have a large team of managers and Totango enables us to identify talent throughout the organization that matches a customer’s needs, as defined by the customer. These can include areas of expertise, specific certifications, language, location and more. We have always been highly proactive in addressing the needs of our largest, most strategic users—Totango let us bring a higher level of engagement to all of our customers at scale.
AT: Does Bentley have any particular challenges that Dynamic Assignment has been able to address?
DM: We have moved to a new pricing model. Users pay for what they utilize, whether on a per day, per month or per quarter basis. This approach puts the onus on Bentley to ensure every single user is maximizing the value of their investment in our solutions. Totango supports this model by engaging with all of our user base across multiple touchpoints.
AT: Can you give us an example of how Dynamic Assignment has supported Bentley?
DM: Yes, we recently had a user that had just engaged with Bentley and was using our solution for the first time. Dynamic Assignment observed this and automatically triggered a search to identify an expert within Bentley that had the right skills to assist with the user’s project, spoke their language, was located within a 1-2 hour drive of the user and met several other criteria. Dynamic Assignment identified this person and automatically sent an email from “her” to the user, stating she’d noticed the user was utilizing our solution for the first time, offered training or to brief her on other Bentley software products that might be relevant to the user’s needs. When the user replied to this email, the Bentley expert contacted the user and set up a call. The user is happy receiving personalized, relevant attention and Bentley has gained the opportunity to deepen engagement and potentially sell in additional solutions.
Previously, we were only able to create this level of engagement with about 200 user calls to action each week. With Dynamic Assignment, we can now handle thousands of interactions with this level of precision.
AT: Do you have any other comments about your experiences with Dynamic Assignment?
DM: We are excited about several things: First, we finally have all the user data we need in one place: usage, contract, marketing, contact, CRM and more. Previously, a CSM had to look in as many as six different systems to get this information and often found conflicting data. We are also excited to increase the quality and frequency of user engagement across our entire user base to grow revenues rather than focusing the majority of our efforts on our largest users. Finally, it has been exciting to deploy Dynamic Assignment to support our new, more customer-centric business model.
