One of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes trying to move to the cloud is finding and retaining the skilled workers necessary to implement today’s rapidly expanding assortment of on-demand services.

This skills gap cost companies more than $250 million in lost business opportunities in just one year, according to a recent survey conducted by the London School of Economics and sponsored by Rackspace.

In order to close this gap and accelerate the customer adoption process, Salesforce.com decided to rethink its training program and radically change how it delivered customer support. The company’s relatively new Trailhead program relies on peer-to-peer, end-user training techniques fortified by gamification tactics that recognize and reward Salesforce customers who help others.

Click here to read our latest commentary in E-Commerce Times regarding how the Trailhead program is not only solving Salesforce’s customer training and adoption … Read More »

One of the most significant trends in business today is the shift from products to services and the related transition to a subscription-based economy. Successfully adopting this new business model requires an organization to rigorously manage its customer relationships to minimize churn and maximize long-term customer value. Achieving this goal demands a new type of customer success management platform. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspective about the business case for a SaaS customer success management solution on the Bluenose blog.

A pivotal principle that sets Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apart from the on-premises, legacy applications of the past is the shift of the vendors’ priorities so they better align with their customers. Rather than placing the burden of deploying and managing the software on the customer, SaaS vendors have to ensure customer satisfaction, minimize churn and maximize the lifetime value of their customers.

Achieving this objective requires the right combination of staff skills, business processes and support systems. Although every successful SaaS company has been committed to the idea of customer success, capturing the right data to gain a holistic view of the customer to better serve their needs has been a significant challenge.

Click here to read why, how the Pulse2013 conference hosted by Gainsight brought attention to this issue, and how THINKstrategies sees a new generation of Cloud-based ‘Customer Success Management’ solutions is addressing … Read More »