Since launching our Pure Storage Customer Success initiative in April last year, Pure has come a long way in terms of disrupting the legacy storage industry. Our mission, rooted in engineering innovation, operational simplicity and ease of adoption, is razor-focused on breaking the forklift upgrade storage model imposed on countless companies by the legacy storage providers.
At the core of this mission is one fundamental concept: measuring our success by the success of our customers. So, while Pure has always kept the customer experience at the forefront of every activity, last year we decided to formalize this by investing in Customer Success resources, defining the Pure customer journey and optimizing the client experience at each step of that journey.
How do we define the customer journey? We recognized early on that the customer experience with Pure was dramatically different and wanted to take the next step by defining this experience and measuring it – so we could evolve and improve over time. We combined client feedback across the board with a framework from our partners at Gainsight, who provide customer success management software and thought leadership, to chart the steps of what we call the Pure client journey.
The Pure customer journey consists of seven core components – here is a brief description of each:
- Defined and Documented Success Goals
- Metrics against which the customer will measure success with our product line and interaction with our teams.
- Initial Stakeholder Engagement
- We identify the customer resources who will benefit from attaining those meaningful metrics.
- Onboarding & Enablement
- We don’t just install, we take the time to understand what is needed for our customer to introduce our technology as a new component of their environment.
- Operational Adoption
- We document and obtain what is needed for our customer to successfully incorporate our technology into their day to day IT processes (e.g. provisioning, security, migrations, etc.) and adopt it as a standard component of their business.
- Proactive & Predictive Support
- Once our technology is implemented, we connect the array into our 24/7 Monitoring platform (Pure1), which will enable the Pure Support organization to detect issues – oftentimes even before the customer notices!
- Systematic Measurement Against Success Goals
- Our Account Executives and Service Account Managers document our progress against predefined success goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days. From that point on, we incorporate progress against success goals into our established communications cadence.
- Multi-faceted Client Feedback Loop
- We capture customer feedback at every action at every step the customer journey – from the sale, to enablement of the array, to a support case experience, to a quarterly business review.
What makes our customer journey unique? We customized the steps in order to apply Customer Success concepts to the delivery of on premise infrastructure technology. Additionally, no single step in the customer journey is relegated to a specific group in our company. Rather, multiple organizations at Pure are held accountable for a customer’s experience at each step of the customer journey. The result is a state of shared accountability that transcends business unit labels.
By taking this approach, our sales teams have the ability and the confidence to take an outcome-based approach with our customers. This starts with a Total Cost of Ownership exercise and then aligns technical recommendations to client business values, such as:
- Improved customer employee productivity
- Increased client revenue opportunities that are tied to better IT performance
- Accelerated customer technology innovation
- Dramatic reductions in storage and other general IT costs
This is very different than the price per gigabyte, painful migration, maintenance extortion storage world to which most people are accustomed. And while it’s surprising to some prospects at first, thousands of customers (including nearly 100 firms within the Fortune 500) have decided it’s the way they want to conduct business with their storage vendor.
Whether you’re a prospect or a current Pure client, please feel free to share your experience with Pure at customersuccess@purestorage.com. We use this feedback to not only improve our field interaction, but also to help drive the priorities of our technology innovation.
