Customer Success at Concur
At Concur, we put our customers at the center of everything we do. From how we design our user experience to how we measure success, our ultimate goal is to provide solutions our customers need and want. Recently, I had the privilege to talk about our customer success journey and what this means to all of us at Concur. It was fun to bring people on our journey that has spanned decades and shaped who we are today—a company passionate about customer success.
Our Journey
Our journey started when Concur was founded in 1993. In our early years, we focused on delivering the best on-premise software solution to automate expense reporting. This meant success equaled hassle-free implementation and support. As we entered our second decade, we embraced the cloud and expanded our solution offerings. Device proliferation drove us to develop mobile solutions, which then led to better web solutions. In our third decade, we matured in our approach to customer success, offering global solutions to meet the unique local requirements of our customers. We opened up our data with APIs and forged strategic, industry partnerships that enabled us, and the broader ecosystem, to fuel even more customer success.
Throughout this journey, we have embraced the ever-changing nature of our industry while listening and responding to customer feedback. How we bring customer success to life today is based on this learning and focus on four key areas:
Infusing It in Our Culture
Concur is a village, full of 7,000 people taking care of our customers all over the world. We foster an environment that is vocal about customer success and puts it front and center. We encourage every employee to internalize what customer success means to them. One of our four main goal areas as a company is Customers, and we ask all employees to define at least one of their annual objectives that helps us make progress in this area.
Innovating for Customer Value
Innovating for customer value is everybody’s responsibility at Concur. We think about innovation in every process, always starting with the customer at the center. From user-centric development to first-call resolution, we start by asking what the experience will be like from the customer’s perspective. We also innovate through a network of partners who leverage our APIs to provide customer value in areas we don’t specialize in.
Leveraging Data to Manage Customer Success
Today, we have the ability to understand how customers use our solutions—it’s amazing what this does for customer success. By leveraging insights we get from our data and third-party tools, we can build the right skillset to support our customers, review how they use our services and make recommendations on how they can optimize their experience.
Organized to Deliver Customer Success
Our business is structured to deliver customer success through various stages of the customer journey—from sales through implementation and ongoing support. Although these are separate organizations with different operating approaches, the end goal is that through each phase, we deliver an ideal experience, enabling our customers to succeed.
We drive customer success by delivering value for customers throughout their journey, as they evolve their businesses, and by becoming a trusted company they never outgrow. As we continue on this journey and look to the future, our approach to customer success will continue to evolve and improve. We will strive to anticipate and respond to our customer’s needs, enabling them to be successful. Because in the end, customer success is our success.
