Zendesk's Teresa Anania on reaching fast time-to-value

“You gotta figure out what expectations the customer has. Not only once they are using the solution, but down the road as well. You’ll need to factor in the timeframe they have for deployment, their need for resources. What kind of self-serve resources will they need?“

We wanted to learn from Teresa what are the best resources that help Zendesk customers during the onboarding process. Anania pointed out tailored best practices: “If you can show the customer how other companies that fit their use case, their vertical, and their company size, have been able to implement the product”, that's extremely valuable.

Like most SaaS companies, Zendesk's business includes high-touch as well as self-serve accounts. Their goal is to make sure all customers have what they need in order to succeed, regardless of the company size. “It think self-serve content is what many customers want these days, so we ensure all customers have access to that. We also invest in high-touch methods like CX thought leadership and even inviting the customer to engage with our team. It's important to keep your resources software-agnostic. At the end of the day you want to make the customer better at what they do, regardless of your technology.

When we asked Teresa how to make a customer onboarding experience really great, she quickly pointed out that onboarding begins very early on, before the customer even made the decision to buy.

“It's really about sitting at the table, understanding their goals and objectives, and the reason they were inspired to buy your solution.You need to capture that in such a way that allows you to then do whatever is needed in order to get to fast time to value".

“We find it is a best practice to involve customer success in pre-sales, because when the customer chooses a vendor, the most important thing he’ll think about is ‘what else is available to me, other than the product’. It's a great time to position customer success to be a one-stop-shop for everything they require during implementation and then further on as they master the solution”.