Software AG
            

Within Software AG, our sales, presales and customer success management (CSM) teams are tasked with making sure customers are happy throughout their experience with our products - and getting the results that they expect. In order to do this, they need to have a 360-degree view of the customer, including any issues or questions they may have.

Perhaps we have fallen victim to the so-called Maslow’s Hammer phenomenon. That is, according to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, that “… it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Sometimes every problem we see is an integration problem, and our big, silver hammer is webMethods.io. We see them sticking up from everywhere, and sometimes just can’t help ourselves. 

So when our own sales team was wondering if there was a way that they could keep better track of new customers even after the deal was signed, our first thought was to use webMethods.io.You see, when an issue was reported, it went through our Pivotal-based ticketing system for the support team, which the account team didn’t have direct access to. 

“It put us at a risk of having a disconnect between the sales organization and support,” said Kuldeepak Angrish, Director for Systems Engineering at Software AG in Palo Alto, CA. 

For Sales, every customer is precious, and they wanted to sleep better at night knowing each one was being taken care of. 

Improving information flow

The Systems Engineering team saw an integration problem – and pulled out webMethods.io as the perfect tool to give the sales team better visibility. “webMethods.io was built for this; it gave us a quick turnaround, was high impact/low touch and could be done with no coding. It took only days to develop and worked immediately.” 

Using webMethods.io, they provided a feed from the Pivotal ticketing system and filtered the ticket information through Salesforce to match and route the ticket to the responsible account executive, pre-sales engineer and Customer Success Manager (CSM), keeping them informed of their customer’s activities at all times. 

“Every night the feeds from the ticketing systems went to all sales, pre-sales and CSMs so they would know what the customers were saying, and get information that could potentially lead to add-on sales.”

Using webMethods.io’s drag and drop capabilities, Systems Engineering connected the relevant apps (like Salesforce, Pivotal, etc.) and added intelligence to enable visibility of the Pivotal information to sales, pre-sales, and CSMs.

“Previously, our data was in silos; we connected it and designed a way to get it to the right people at the right time,” said Kuldeepak Angrish. 

It only took the Systems Engineering team a few days to build the flow, and it worked immediately on all tickets for North America. Upon completion, webMethods’ Net Promoter Score increased 31% to its highest level in 2020. 

The next enhancement to the system will be an escalation process – where the number of days a ticket is unanswered will send out an alert.  The next step is to roll it out to other regions that have the same problems.