3 Companies That Create First-Class Customer Experiences

by Stephen Danos
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Customer experience and engagement have a tremendous impact on a company’s financial outlook, making these factors front of mind for companies across every industry. Yet customer lifecycle management encompasses more than money.

This process can generate and sustain goodwill and loyalty, help grow a business’s customer base, increase acquisition and retention, and more.
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At Smartsheet ENGAGE’18, presenters from Marketo, SAP Ariba, and CAVU Aerospace shared insights into how they use Smartsheet for customer-centric operations to support customer success initiatives. Here’s how they collaborated with and provided real-time visibility to their customers, leading to refined workflows and improved customer experiences.
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Marketo Quickly Responds to Customer Needs

Marketo is a leader in marketing engagement and automation software. Beyond their software offering they created Marketo University, an education program that provides learning paths, videos, and certification opportunities to customers.

Before adopting Smartsheet, Marketo had manual processes and multiple platforms in place for tracking course enrollment, attendance, and payment. If an internal stakeholder wanted to access a customer’s training history, the team’s education specialist needed to manually search for this information, which wasn’t centralized.

As the company was growing quickly, their education team brainstormed ways they could improve their public training operations and customer service by using automation and more effective communication.
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“Beforehand it would be so difficult for a customer even to just change or cancel their enrollment. Now it can happen within seconds.”  
Taryn Petzel
Education Specialist
Marketo
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Smartsheet became their one-stop-shop for customer enrollment data, and the team surfaces these key metrics using Smartsheet dashboards. When the team receives an internal request for a specific customer’s training history, they can pull together a report within a few minutes. It also speeds up processes, such as payment processing and last-minute enrollment changes, that directly impact customers.
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SAP Ariba Enables Real-Time Visibility for Customers

It’s crucial to create and sustain a delightful and effective customer experience. SAP Ariba, which helps customers digitally transform their procurement operations, understands the role that data plays in the process.

SAP Ariba’s customers, particularly large corporations with multiple ERPs, divisions, and processes, didn’t know from whom they were buying goods. In order to transform the procurement operations of customers, it’s important that SAP Ariba’s customers have accurate baseline data to get their suppliers on board. For this process, they work with customers early on to come up with solutions to process challenges.
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“[Our dashboard] is extremely helpful in educating the customer and our internal teams about how they can approach projects better in the future.”
Cathy Fabich
Director, Customer Value
SAP Ariba

By validating data with Smartsheet forms and using real-time dashboards to diagnose issues as they arise, SAP Ariba helps customers make improvements to procurement processes. These dashboards help surface outreach statuses paired with informative descriptions, root cause issues (such as invalid data or missed emails), and many other data-based insights.
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CAVU Aerospace Helps Customers Recoup Investments

CAVU Aerospace, an aircraft dismantler headquartered at a former U.S. Army Air Force base, handles the retirement phase of commercial airline planes. During the dismantling process, which they do for both themselves and third-party customers, their crews salvage the best aircraft parts to recirculate them back into the market.

However, they ran into a challenge: what’s the best way for CAVU Aerospace to help customers recoup their large capital investments, which can range from $250 thousand to $12 million?

In the past, parts from the aircraft were manually labeled with handwritten removal tags. Those tag details were manually entered into an Excel spreadsheet, and the customer was provided with daily, weekly, or monthly updates of what parts came off the aircraft.

Without real-time visibility into the process, customers couldn’t turn those part sales around at a quick and reliable pace.

To solve for this, CAVU created a proprietary API and form through Smartsheet that creates a removal tag, which is automatically added as a row attachment in their master sheet. The tag is then printed for labeling the physical part. CAVU’s customers can view the sheet, which gives them real-time access to their inventory.

“[Customers] are actually able to redirect inventory to repair stations, prioritize stuff to go out faster, and are enabled to return their revenue a lot faster than if they were asking for Excel sheets.”
Brent Webb
Secret Weapon
CAVU Aerospace
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Using Smartsheet to track removal tags strengthened their relationships to customers, who even leave comments directly in the sheet. CAVU Aerospace’s management team also gain data-based insights into performance and production across all sites.

By implementing Smartsheet as a solution, CAVU Aerospace almost doubled the number of aircraft they dismantle per year and reduced the number of invalid parts by 95 percent.

Watch the full ENGAGE session video to learn more from these companies’ approaches to customer-centric processes, including a Q&A with the audience:

Source: Smartsheet Blog
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