Addressing the Complexity of the Technology: Lessons from Priya Sarathy's Experience Blog 2 of 9

This is the second post in our Executive Guide to Cutting Edge Tech Customer Onboarding. If you haven't read the first post, check it out here.

In the fast-paced world of technology, adopting innovative solutions is often more about the journey than the destination. Priya Sarathy, CEO of Wheel Data Strategies, recently shared a compelling story from her past, illustrating the critical importance of early communication and strategic planning in digital transformations.

The Challenge of Delayed Communication

Priya's organization faced a significant hurdle during an AI product migration to the cloud. They risked losing customers due to inadequate early onboarding discussions. Six months before the release, customers were informed about crucial changes, such as API modifications and data format updates. This delayed communication led to substantial pushback and resistance, as customers struggled to adapt to the new product. Consequently, the fintech company incurred high 'unplanned costs' from maintaining legacy processes alongside the new product until customers could plan and budget for the necessary upgrades.

Beyond Technology: The Human Element

Successful technology adoption is rarely about technology alone. Digital transformations often require upskilling resources, replacing key components, and altering engagement models. The goal is to deliver a product that enhances value through improved quality, accuracy, usability, or customer trust. Priya's story underscores the importance of early communication and strategic planning in achieving these objectives.

Early Engagement is Key

For leaders of Account Managers, Customer Success Managers, or Customer and Product Marketing professionals, Priya's narrative is a familiar one. The first month of implementation should focus on allowing customers and their stakeholders ample opportunity to ask questions and raise concerns. This phase requires extensive storytelling to convey the technology's value proposition, helping executives and champions understand how the technology will enhance their operations and lives.  

Potential customers typically ask themselves a few questions when deciding to adopt an innovation as described by Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations:

1. How well does it fit in my existing company environment?

2. Can I try it before I buy it?

3. How is this innovation better than the alternatives?

4. Are the benefits noticeable?  Can I see it being used by others?

5. Is it easy to understand and adopt?

Practical Strategies to Increase Understanding

1. Share Success Stories: Sharing relevant success stories aligned with the customer's industry helps show how it can fit in their environment. These stories should include the customer background, problem statement, solution, results, customer testimonial, and visual aids.

2. Show How You Solve Problems: Keep demos simple and engaging, using relevant data and familiar contexts. This gives your customers the opportunity to try out the technology, see how it’s better than the alternatives and its benefits.

3. Provide End-to-End Documentation: Technologies often require significant customization to fit into existing enterprise systems. Be prepared with comprehensive documentation and guides to make it easier to understand how to adopt in an enterprise environment.  Topics could include data quality and source changes, changes in feature engineering, integrating with existing mobile device management systems or single sign on solutions.

4. Phased Deployment: Consider deploying your solution in a phased approach to break down complexity and manage risks, while speeding up time-to-value.

Takeaways

Priya Sarathy’s story is a powerful reminder that technology adoption requires more than just technical expertise. It demands early and effective communication, strategic planning, and a deep understanding of customer needs. By sharing success stories, simplifying demos, providing thorough documentation, and deploying solutions in phases, you can enhance your customers' journey towards successful technology adoption.

Stay tuned for our next article, where we will explore best practices in innovation diffusion to further mitigate risks and accelerate time-to-value.

About the Authors:

Kathleen Rouse is an Independent Consultant and has taken her 20+ years of experience maximizing adoption and increasing renewal rates to best-in-class 95%+ and 45%+ growth rates and turned them into playbooks, processes & templates for her clients to increase their customer retention and growth.

Priya Sarathy, Ph.D, CDMP is a data strategy leader and analytics enabler with over 15 years of experience in leading analytics solution design and build, and transformations across various industries, such as financial, telecom, technology, and services. She has a Ph.D. in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics, and multiple certifications in machine learning, programming, and Data management.

Ursula Llabres currently leads the Reality Labs Customer Growth Team at Meta. The team’s mission is to help clients solve business problems with tomorrow’s technology and open new markets bringing innovative XR Technology into the Enterprise. Ursula was one of the founding leaders of customer success practice (being one of the first 10 in CS at salesforce.com back in 2005) and since has transformed and led high performing global teams at some of the top tech companies like Oracle, Salesforce.com, Box, Microsoft, Insidesales.com and now Meta to name a few.

Dr. Beverly Wright serves as VP of Data Science & AI, and Executive Director for Data Science & AI at University of Georgia, as well as Past President of INFORMS Analytics Society, and Chair of Data Science & AI Society at Technology Association of Georgia. Beverly is a sought-after professional speaker at established conferences, presenting on topics related to data science, artificial intelligence, consumer insights, and marketing analytics.