The barriers to scale
William Pinho — We're going through a major growth initiative and migration at Acoustic. We are upgrading and moving our clients to completely new infrastructure. It's not a simple flick of a switch. There's a lot of work that goes into it from our team side, from service to CS, so on and so forth.
The biggest problem that we had as a CS team is one, working in multiple different platforms. I think that's a common problem that you see no matter what company you go to, and that was something that we were looking to solve is how can we have our CSMs essentially consolidate and minimise the number of applications that they need to work in. So that was one.
The second is visibility. I think we lacked visibility into how our customers were utilising our solutions in terms of what features were they utilising and how that correlates to adoption, but also the number of logins they had, usage, so on and so forth.
From months to days
Fortunately, with Planhat, we were able to stand and get everything integrated over a weekend. So previously it took us 6, 7, 8 months to do that, and then we were able to have everything integrated and have that visibility within a weekend to then start seeing just the initial benefits of who and what our customers were doing.
Planhat right now is providing us perspective where we are tracking these integrations, whether they have started, are they delayed? If they're delayed, why they're delayed, who are these projects with? To understand from a CS perspective where we need to become more engaged.
This is all then piping into a dashboard that provides a central location for our team to view this information, to understand one, where do they need to start their days and where they need to interact with our clients and drive that behaviour, or where do we need to have some type of escalation to bring in other key stakeholders to help progress these projects.
Managing 7x the clients
Previously with our other vendor, within our digital space, we could only manage roughly 40 clients. Over the course of the last year, we have grown that team from instal base from 40 clients to just north of 280 clients that are managed digitally, and this is primarily driven by the number, the data points that we have today that we're able to access through Planhat, but also the specific and unique health scores that are not subjective anymore, but data driven.
We truly believe where we are going as a company from a scaled approach and truly our growth initiative Planhat is allowing us to scale not just from a CS perspective, but allowing us to bring in other teams and other departments, whether it's product onboarding services and so on and so forth.
A single source of truth
We want every team cross-functionally to be a part of Planhat, and touching Planhat in some shape or measure. Right now we have Customer Success utilising Planhat. We have Product now utilising Planhat. We have Services to a degree, Onboarding to a degree, as well as our Support team.
It's allowing them to understand, back to my earlier point, the type of engagements that our team is having and how often, how frequently, but also the sentiment of those engagements. That information wasn't easily accessible prior.
Where now Planhat is allowing the team to easily click in and drill into our engagement from not only from a CS perspective, but support services as well. So it's providing a lot more cross-functional synergy.
Director of Digital Customer Success Strategy
Acoustic
William is a customer success leader with over 10 years of experience helping global B2B companies drive retention and scale engagement. As Director of Worldwide Digital Customer Success Strategy at Acoustic, he leads digital-first initiatives that improve the customer journey. He’s held key roles across success and strategy, with previous experience at IBM supporting enterprise clients through AI-powered solutions.
