Moving to a SaaS Model – A Customer Service Perspective

by Guy Galon on December 16, 2020

There’s a unique sense of pride you feel when undertaking a new challenge. That’s what I remember feeling when I joined Hysolate in early 2020. They already had a great team and an innovative product and were offering me a challenge – to take their Customer Success team in an entirely new direction.

Hysolate was undergoing a significant change at the time, revamping the product architecture to become 100% SaaS based. This was much more than just a technical challenge – the entire value chain from marketing through customer acquisition and customer success had to change.

Customer Success at Hysolate is responsible for the entire customer lifetime journey covering onboarding, deployment, product adoption, support, and renewals. The first challenge that we took upon ourselves was to design and implement a deployment methodology which would complement our SaaS product offering. We believe this is the basis for a successful onboarding and would help our customers quickly find value.

The challenge became more complex for a few reasons:

Our new SaaS based product is based on a technology previously deployed on premise, meaning we needed to adapt our playbooks. This comes with great managerial and professional challenges, which I personally find very exciting.
Customer Success is involved in Go-to-Marker planning together with the sales, marketing and product teams. We needed to align internally on our messaging, value, and expected customer experience.
Being able to channel customer requirements and feedback to the Product team is crucial for a startup. A proficient Customer Success team should know that product backwards and forwards and provide strong customer feedback to the product team. The more we interact with customers, the better we are able to qualify use cases while learning which use cases are less applicable. I see Customer Success as having an important role in navigating and guiding the company. Not only do we have to know where the product is going, but we also need to check where we are on the competitor landscape ‘map’ to make sure we stay on the right path. This is an ongoing journey and it’s my great pride to be the voice of our customers inside Hysolate.
Migrating ‘old’ customers to the new SaaS platform. It’s no surprise that many of our customers are thinking about Cloud migration given the reality of remote work in 2020. This takes careful planning, taking into consideration business objectives, other cloud migration initiatives, and security. By offering a new, cloud-based solution, we support customers who are designing a new architecture, allowing them to scale quickly while meeting regulation and compliance requirements. Like any migration to a SaaS based service, there are technical and operational challenges that we need to overcome together with our customers.

I now want to walk you through a few real-life examples that my team and I recently came across.

Sponsorships Available

A Financial Service SMB that Needed to Browse ‘High-Risk’ Websites

The first example is based on our engagement with a financial services SMB. Their Customer Support team was responsible for browsing what the customer identified as high-risk websites and downloading files. They also needed to use screen sharing software. These activities were considered risky when performed on a corporate device and were therefore blocked. The challenge for the company and for the Hysolate Customer Success team was to split the support team activities between the host device and the dedicated zone Hysolate provided for the team. Ultimately, the SMB was able to use Hysolate to allow access to these risky sites. In addition, access from the workspace to the enterprise network was blocked. We complemented the solution with a short orientation session to familiarize the Customer Support team with the new endpoint experience.

Allowing a Developer Team to Access External Forums that Were Previously Blocked

Another example that I’d like to share is providing secure access to a developer team. This team needed to access external training sites, browse developer forums, and conduct Zoom calls with external vendors. In this case, the end users would perform most of their day-to-day activities on the host and use Hysolate’s Isolated Workspace for learning purposes and collaboration with other vendors. Ultimately, we were able to permit Internet access from the isolated Workspace to select websites and Zoom.

Summary:

Our mission is to help the IT and security teams of our customers to make their workforce effective, productive, and secure. This requires a total dedication to understanding our customers’ needs and challenges. This customer centric approach helps our customers deploy Hysolate Workspace quickly and realize immediate value. This is what Customer Success in Hysolate is all about.

The post Moving to a SaaS Model – A Customer Service Perspective appeared first on Hysolate.