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Why customer success matters: because every second counts
It’s 9 a.m. on Monday, and you’ve done the school run and the commute and you’re finally sitting at your desk with a second cup of hot coffee ready to start the day. First thing on the (terrifyingly long) to-do list: that big integration project with a brand new product.
You’re excited about what it can do, all the demos you saw during the purchase process — but they feel like a lifetime ago. You need to understand it more on a personal level for maximum success. The question is, where do you even start?
Organizations choose a platform like Palette because they are time-poor, overstretched, under pressure. But the irony is, getting up to speed with any powerful platform on your own takes time — time you don’t have.
This situation is what customer success is all about.
You might be excited about the opportunity afforded by a new product, and the wealth of features it offers. But the true killer feature is a great customer success team.
What is customer success?
Customer success is not just technical support. Technical support is reactive: something breaks, an on-call support engineer helps you fix it.
Customer success is proactive: it’s a partnership that’s there for you, helping you navigate every step of the way from the moment the ink is dry on the contract (and sometimes even before that).
It’s your guide from your initial interaction with the product to fully realizing its value, ensuring your initiatives, your projects, and ultimately your business thrives. Our mission is simple: To help you get the most from Palette, achieve your goals as fast as possible, and have an amazing experience along the way.
Now, almost every SaaS company has a customer success practice — to give you the inside scoop, if we didn’t make you happy, you’d be unlikely to renew your contract! But not all customer success strategies are created equal. Let us show you what goes into ours.
What to expect on your success journey, step by step
Every customer success engagement consists of a number of steps, from onboarding, implementation and adoption, to ongoing ‘business as usual’ touchpoints like support.
Customer Success Engagement Model
1. Tailored onboarding
The journey begins with a kickoff meeting where our team gains in-depth knowledge of your needs, over and above what we already captured during your purchase process and any proof of value (PoV) stages we underwent.
This includes:
- Understanding business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) that you plan to use internally.
- Identifying critical dates, pain points, and project stakeholders you’re working with.
- Demonstrating how Palette’s features align with your goals, in your unique circumstances.
Our goal is that you’re onboarded and up and running within 30 days.
And let’s take a look at a real review from a customer to see how well we do:
"The Spectro Cloud team was devoted to helping us evaluate the product, answer our questions, and act on our feedback. With their hands-on approach and teamwork spirit, they demonstrated their technical expertise and commitment to our success. They built an exceptional product and an equally exceptional team to support it."
2. Implementation support
Once onboarding is complete, you move into implementation. Whether you’re using our SaaS or deploying a self-hosted instance of Palette, your assigned Customer Success Engineer (CSE) and Customer Success Manager (CSM) provide:
- Strategic guidance on architecture and best practices.
- Assistance with CI/CD toolchain integration and tailored deployments.
- High-level architecture reviews.
"Spectro Cloud Palette is good. The team standing behind it is great! The Spectro Cloud team is the best I've encountered in my career. We bought them even more than the Palette product."
3. Adoption training
Empowerment is key to adoption and product usage. Through virtual Palette 101 training (6-8 hours of content), you gain confidence in:
- Essential constructs like Cluster Profiles and security settings.
- Specialized deployments and architectural deep dives.
- Developer interaction with Palette for seamless operations.
"We've been mightily impressed with Palette, from the process of installation right through to profile creation and cluster deployment. Documentation is detailed, clear and concise, the teams we've interfaced with are exceptional”
4. Proactive engagement
Regular check-ins — weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly — ensure you stay on track. These sessions include:
- Roadmap discussions and reviews of new features and closed cases.
- Semi-annual health checks of installations.
- Celebrations of milestones and achievements.
- Planning for forthcoming renewals, new projects or expansions.
The aim is to anticipate your needs and offer advice to keep you moving fast, with no missteps. And the best way to do that is for us to act as part of your extended team.
“Spectro Cloud have some truly outstanding Kubernetes knowledge”
5. 24x7x365 technical support
We have customer support personnel around the world, enabling us to offer follow-the-sun service and personal issue management. We deliver:
- Resolution of issues with a sense of urgency, in real time.
- Support for third-party solutions included in Spectro Cloud Packs, and triage across vendors for multi-vendor environments.
- Constantly updated documentation for quick reference during planning and configuration.
"The platform is extremely powerful and easy to use and the technical support provided is second to none." https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-management-tooling/vendor/spectro-cloud/product/palette/review/view/5630578
Our customer success model: a white-glove approach
At each touchpoint we aim for excellence, but the real magic is in how we approach the relationship as a whole.
At Spectro Cloud, our customer success is rooted in a “white-glove service” approach.
The term ‘white glove’ comes from the traditional outfits worn by professionals in the early 20th century who worked in restaurants, hotels or stately homes and were known to provide personalized, detailed, reliable and meticulous service. We take this concept of very high quality service and incorporate it into how we work with our customers every day to ensure they are satisfied with our products and services.
Core principles:
- Proactive Partnership: We always work to anticipate, not just react. Success starts with understanding the customer’s unique goals and aligning Spectro Cloud’s solutions to their vision.
- Exceptional Service: Operating with urgency and delivering tailored experiences to address individual challenges.
- Continuous Engagement: Establishing trust through regular touchpoints and consistent value delivery. We see ourselves as your voice back to our wider business for customer feedback and feature requests.
- Metrics-Driven Success: Using frameworks like CLEAR (Connect, Learn, Enable, Advocate, Revenue) to quantify engagement and retention outcomes.
- Personalized experiences. At every stage, we meet our customers where they are — this means communicating and working with them via their preferred channels, methods, timeframes and geography.
Our Customer Success team see themselves in the role of a conductor — ensuring harmony across every customer interaction, from the big picture to the smallest detail. We are committed to removing barriers, solving problems and generally just going above and beyond to ensure your success. Our goal is nothing less than to have you become a referenceable customer for life.
CLEAR advantages
We bring the right attitude, but we also bring process. We have an adoption framework called CLEAR that we use to guide our activities and measure how well we’re living up to our high standards.
In addition to other measures of customer satisfaction (Csat) and customer loyalty (eg NPS) we have a CLEAR score for every customer, and we report on its five areas to the rest of the business:
- Connect: We’ve engaged with you to build relationships and establish regular communication
- Learn: We know your business, and understand your use cases and success criteria
- Enable: We’ve equipped your team to use the product, accelerating your adoption.
- Advocate: We’ve earned your trust and happiness to the extent that you’d happily be a reference for us.
- Revenue: You’ve ultimately seen the impact from adopting Palette and are happy to ‘put your money where your mouth is’, through renewing your contract and growing your usage.
Ready to see for yourself?
At the core of customer experience, our goal is to ensure you receive the maximum value from Palette. We want you to be successful from day one and with every initiative you need to tackle.
We’re excited to join you on this journey, and we look forward to connecting with you on your first onboarding call 😊! But the first step is a demo with our esteemed colleagues in our sales team. Ready to set one up?