All for One Group is growing on multiple fronts. In addition to its sales team targeting net new sales, the SAP partner with subsidiaries in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland established a Customer Success Management team to connect its base of more than 2,500 regular customers with the full range of products and services in its portfolio.
All for One Group realized, however, that customer success is about more than growth. The company views customer success as enhanced competitiveness in a digital world, stronger market position, and increased ability to face today’s challenges as well as those that lie ahead.
Michael Zitz, managing director for Customer Success Management at All for One Group, says, “Our customers also made it perfectly clear that they wished for a stronger relationship and closer, better communication between our company and theirs in order to make our common projects and implementation processes more successful.”
“We aim for long-lasting, strong, and trustworthy customer relationships, which allow us to provide and implement services and solutions that perfectly meet – or, even better, exceed – our customers’ needs and expectations,” adds Zitz. “We want to be a strong and reliable partner so that they gladly recommend us within their network.”
Evolving into a Customer Success-Oriented Business
Establishing a business united to support and ensure the growth of its customer base was one of All for One Group’s major moves throughout its “Strategy 2022,” a comprehensive realignment its business strategy containing several cornerstones.
All for One Group established a Customer Success Management team, which consists of 50 team members, 35 of whom are customer success managers (CSMs). Dedicated to All for One’s existing customer base, CSMs serve as the primary points of contact for existing customers. Additionally, they take a proactive approach to providing comprehensive support throughout the customer life cycle.
CSMs are an integral part of All for One Group’s six-phase Customer Success Management program, the #Customer4Life Process:
- Getting to know CSM: An initial meeting that can include discussion of a roadmap for partnership and establishing the role and importance of the CSM
- Evaluating the status quo: Using a Qualtrics online survey to assess the status of the current partnership
- Creating a future vision: Identifying the customer’s goals, ambitions, and visions based on the survey
- Developing a success plan: Prioritizing topics and tasks that will help the client’s business meet its goals
- Implementing measures: Defining concrete measures to achieve goals based on the success plan
- Measuring success: Continually reviewing, giving feedback, and identifying potential areas for improvement
All for One Group is divided into market units that address specialized fields, such as conversion, intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP S/4HANA, customer experience, strategy and transformation, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Each CSM has market unit expertise, and they are assigned to customers based on geography and industries – including industrial machinery and components (IM&C), automotive, and consumer goods – as well as the types of solutions the customer uses. Additionally, all market units work together to meet customer needs and expand accounts with the products and features they need.
Enabling cooperation and communication across a team of 1,800 employees was a major undertaking for All for One Group. With the introduction of customer success management, the business initiated a cultural change that broadened an employee’s focus from only their market units to a company-wide, customer-focused perspective and established regular meetings where project statuses and new ideas can be exchanged.
“Although we have not yet fully completed our transformation, we are already seeing major changes in the mindsets of our colleagues and can feel the progress we make as a group,” Zitz points out.
Positive Response
Although All for One’s customer success management program is new, running its pilot from January 2019 to September 2019 and then fully launching in October 2019, the response from customers shows that they strongly agree with the new approach. Feedback includes comments such as, “This is exactly what we have been waiting for – a point of contact at C-level” and “After being introduced to All for One Group’s customer success management, I can confirm that this is 100 percent the right way for us.”
“A clear change we noticed right after introducing customer success management is that we were able to establish closer contact with our customers, allowing us to gain further trust and better, more direct and open communication with them,” says Zitz.
“The most important thing is always putting your customers first,“ he adds. “This might sound mundane, but we strongly believe it’s the only way to go if you want to establish long-lasting relationships built on trust and understanding of customers’ goals and requirements.”
“We continuously measure our customers’ opinions and satisfaction using Experience Management solutions from SAP and Qualtrics and, furthermore, maintain a fairly good overview of how successful we have been so far, based on our sales pipeline, key performance indicators, and by comparing our realized revenue per customer to numbers from previous years,” Zitz comments.
In the future, All for One Group plans to leverage experience management for automated feedback at each customer touchpoint. “This will allow us to react better to their individual needs, desires, and requirements and, ultimately, offer them exactly what they want and need,” he says. “We aim for a relationship at eye-level to which both parties contribute equally toward reaching one common goal: strengthening our customers’ competitiveness.”