6 More Things I learned at TSW

Last week, I reviewed 7 customer success-related learnings from TSW. This week, it’s on to tools, knowledge management, and renewals.

About tools:

• While CRM and knowledge management tools continue to enjoy the highest adoption levels, the fastest adoption increases between last year and this year are: consumption analytics, contract and entitlement management, learning-management systems (LMS), mobility and video, recurring revenue management, and support scheduling. Not surprisingly, most of the increases are related to the growth of customer success programs.
• The  level of planned expenditures for tools is way up this year, with chat, knowledge and content management, communities and collaboration, and retiring and analytics at the top.
• Salesforce penetration has increased further from last year, to 36%. (Hint, if you are planning to implement Service Cloud and community Cloud, we can help.)

John Summers from FireEye used wording I loved to talk about knowledge management: “you can over-improve your knowledge base just like you can over-improve your house.” Balance the time it gets to take the information to the user vs. quality. Several attendees were boasting of posting new information in the knowledge base within hours of discovery.

And finally, two ideas about renewals:

• For all of you moving from on-premise to cloud: try compensating the renewals reps on incremental annual revenue when customers switch to cloud.
• Identify risk factors for renewals and staff accordingly. For instance: first renewal, no support cases in several months, or conversely lots of cases, recent severity 1 cases, using older releases, etc. I liked the idea that the list could be validated and improved over time.