COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY FOR CLOUD SERVICES
When managing a cloud product, customers are always concerned about updates affecting their companies’ schedules. Since cloud services are multi-tenant, it is very challenging to make adjustments for any individual customer. If you adjust for one, the adjusted date affects another and has a domino effect. Going down this road is a slippery slope, and we should avoid making decisions based on individual orgs/tenants. We hear so many iterations of the same thing: ‘Please don’t update the service on this day because we have a <put your reason here>’. Reasons can be as simple as we have nobody to support the update on that day, or as complex as it falls during the end of ‘our’ fiscal year, we have a go-live of another product, or a company-wide blackout period. We cannot address every single exception, and at the same time, we must understand that we are a service provider and our job is to help our customers reach their ultimate goals. Considering we always want to encourage adoption, consumption and renewal, what can we do to avoid these surprises and empower our customers to feel in control of their updates, upgrades, maintenance and downtimes?
- Maintain a regular cadence. This cadence may be every week, month, quarter or season (Spring/Summer etc.). Knowing there is a cadence around certain activities will go a long way for customers, as they will always have an idea of when certain activities are planned.
- The timing of updates should be consistent, repeatable and predictable. For example we want to always update on the first Monday of the month at 8:00 PM PST or every Wednesday 8:00 PM PST to 8:30 PM PST. Having a set time for activities takes all the guesswork out of the equation, and customers won’t have to remember when the updates will occur. Yes, they will have to know the first Monday of the month at 8:00 PM, but simplifying the date and time, and having the occurrence repeatable and predictable makes your job much easier and helps customers easily remember.
- We must have a calendar or event scheduler where we can post a referenceable schedule for customers. We can link to this from our applications, support CRM or community and make it easy to find and review. Products like Atlassian’s Status.io allow one to schedule upcoming events. This is for short term scheduling but can be extremely useful in reminding customers about the upcoming event. I wouldn’t recommend scheduling more than several weeks out or less, or the reminder will be diluted. Of course this is dependent on the change and impact. For example certain changes could be extremely impactful and require longer notice like end of life for TLS 1.1 or IP address whitelisting required by a certain date. These are just a couple of examples where you may want a longer time but generally keeping it more short-term transactional has the best impact and adherence. Users subscribe to specific pods and services, and when an upcoming activity including maintenance, downtimes, and upgrades is scheduled in the upcoming weeks, all subscribers receive a notice reminding them.
- Keep a long term calendar or events list on a searchable page, so customers can plan based on their other milestones. Many customers have end of year blackout periods or retailers may have policies of no change around Black Friday. Jive community software has a built in calendar that you can use in your community. If you use SalesForce.com’s community you can utilize the ‘events’ option. Here you can publish your events well in advance. A traditional calendar with events listed is the easiest to consume and digest. For standard repeatable events you may update a year at a time. There may be changes along the way but those will be exceptions. Planning in advance reduces customer confusion, conflict and resistance. If you put the plan out well in advance you are giving ample notice and this will reduce customer resistance.
- Have an application splash page. Having a splash page or scroll in your application is extremely useful. If you don’t have a splash page, window or scroll you can use to push in-app notifications, you should enhance your product to include this necessary update methodology. Applications like Salesforce or Workday push a small popup reminding users of upcoming maintenance. The wider we cast our communication net, the more informed the user base.
- Do not schedule events during certain times. Avoid the beginning or end of the month and quarter, as well as regional holidays that may affect a customer’s ability to manage their environment. If your pods are regional (APJ, EMEA, APAC, NA) then you may want to analyze and consider how many of your customers in the pod are from those regions, and plan accordingly based on business hours, area holidays, and any other considerations that may not be optimal for your customer. Remember you cannot always accommodate every customer, but you can reduce the impact for many to most customers by considering the majority.
- Have and maintain a policy of notification cadence. Because cloud is so dynamic and may require regular updates, apart from the well-planned ones, make sure you have a communicable guideline on how many days’ notice you will minimally provide before any updates outside of scheduled updates. For example, have a policy that you will always provide 5 business days notice for all updates not covered by the calendar. The best and most successful practice is to avail your regular maintenance schedule and whenever possible adhere to those windows. Most customers will understand rolling out during the regular window, and the value proposition is the full regression test of these deliverables. That’s not to say one-off fixes are not tested, but the testing in a release will be significantly more comprehensive and thorough and not isolated to the individual fix.
- Communicate, Communicate and Communicate! Having well defined processes and policies will not be effective unless we communicate them to our customers. There are many ways an organization can help customers succeed by enabling and educating them. From the beginning of the sales cycle, sales can begin by planting the seeds on how the product is maintained and updated. Onboarding is crucial in the next step. The onboarding team should enable the customer to subscribe to the status or trust page, calendar and/or events, and socialize the defined processes. Online help and docs should include a high level description of practices and processes and easy access links for calendars, events, status page and general policies. Next the CSM team has an opportunity to continue affirming the cadence by reminding customers during their interactions of all upcoming service affecting updates. This can also be used as an opportunity to keep customers up to date. Calling a customer and informing them of upcoming events will go a long way to establishing and building a trusted relationship. And it’s the perfect ice breaker to start discussing upcoming projects and product needs. Lastly the technical support team should always be cognizant of a customer’s environment and remind customers of upcoming events. It’s a great way to continue building trust and will go a long way to enable customers in your processes, so they can ensure their organization's initiatives take these factors into consideration.
Having set processes that are repeatable and predictable will help customers align all of their business agendas. Maintaining a strong commitment to cadence and process, even when there’s pressure to deviate, will pay off two-fold. In a multi-tenant environment making exceptions will upset the balance and inevitably disrupt another. Yes, you do have to make informed, considerate exceptions, but with due diligence and insight into the impact of those decisions. Transparency, consistency and reliability will strengthen your relationship with your customer and encourage consumption, growth, adoption, and expansion. Don’t forget to communicate, communicate, communicate!
Good list. You see #6 frequently getting missed or jumbled up in calendared cadences frequently