Learning From our New Customers: How can we improve the SOLID implementation process?

Business challenges in the current market can be daunting; tight margins, competitive pressures and increasingly demanding customers. Operational efficiency is essential to improving customer service levels and reducing costs. If SOLIDitech only had one job, you could say it was to help our customers improve efficiency through software automation. Automation, we believe, is the best way that software can enable improved customer service.

When our success is measured on our customer’s success, who better to help us identify where we should focus our efforts for future SOLID releases, than our customers themselves?

As such, we regularly survey our new customers to identify how we can improve our onboarding and implementation processes. Implementing automation for your business can be a complex process. It’s not a switch that gets flicked, it’s a mind-set change and requires a relationship with our customers. This relationship is built on understanding their businesses and then helping them with the software adoption and education process.

We’d like to thank everyone who took part in these surveys, your answers always prove to be very insightful and help us to continually improve our software and services to you.

It’s great to know that 80% of our new SOLIDitech customers are very happy with their new SOLID Business Automation Platform, but they have highlighted a need for more training.

Below is some more detailed insight into some survey results.

Our customers are typically looking to evolve their operations from a manual system to an automated one. One customer recently reported that “Our business ran manual processes in all departments, so we were looking for a tool to automate and unify business processes from one central platform”.

Our reputation as a specialist within the ISP industry and our list of established customers, coupled with the valuable insights we receive from our surveys, also serves as a great way to continue to improve our SOLID solution.

• “Our billing department, as now that billing is automated the process can occur more speedily so that resources can focus on other core financial requirements”
• “Deployment and operations. The task driven system does not allow anything to fall through the cracks, which allows us to deliver a consistent experience to our customers every time.”
• Everything, “from ordering all the way to deployment”

Investing in an entirely new automation platform is not something one undertakes lightly.

SOLID is a large system and requires training and in-the-field experience in order to master. Whilst our new customers are enjoying the many benefits the introduction of SOLID brings, there are many elements to a successful Change Management Strategy that need to be considered.

As part of the survey we tried to gauge the effectiveness of the training we provide. Whilst we do provide onboarding training and a free online FAQ and How-To resource (SOLID Help), it was highlighted to us that our customers need more. Adopting a new automation platform successfully often requires a mindshift. The system tends to heavily alter the way Finance, Support, Sales and Project Management Teams operate. To this end we’re currently reviewing how we can make sure that our customers teams have all the resources they need in order to succeed.

Constructive feedback is always important to us, because we live by the ethos that ‘Our Customers Come First’. In living by that ethos, we asked the all-important question – how can we improve?

When asked about how they feel about SOLID, overall, our customers were enthusiastic about recommending the platform. There were some valuable insights regarding the extent to which the SOLID platform had been integrated into their business. In addition, it was also suggested that we consider the user experience of the platform and how we can improve it.

When asked about features they’d like to see developed next, additional Project Management tools ranked highly, along with an IOS Field Engineer App (we currently support Android).

With an engineering team of over 60 qualified software engineers investigating technologies from improved BI Reporting through to Machine Learning – we are looking to prepare our customers for an exciting future.

Something positive a customer said that stuck with us: “Just keep doing what you’re doing and don’t lose the passion.”

To help our customers navigate the SOLID platform, we have SOLID Help – a dedicated Self-Help and Knowledge Base resource hub.

Here, one can access articles and videos for help on using SOLID. To find out more about this resource, check out this dedicated page.