Tools and headcount?

Scott Hopper

Do you feel there are tools you've implemented that you should have added administrative headcount to optimize time and usage of the product.  Is there a level of usage or staffing that dictates a partial or full headcount. 

Salesforce and  Gainsight might be examples.  

Brian Hartley

Agree on Salesforce, 100%.  Jira and Hubspot would be two others.

Scott Hopper

Do you use Hubspot and Salesforce together.   What things with Jira does CS require workflow to. 

Brian Hartley

Yes, we tie in Hubspot with Salesforce pretty closely.  I mentioned Jira as a company-wide tool vs CS centric - should have clarified!

Shaun Porcar

In addition to the above I'd add BI platform's in the mix. Most recently I partnered with our ops team to build and maintain several Tableau dashboards for our team and exec use.

Alex Turkovic

Salesforce, Netsuite, Zendesk for ticketing. Has anyone successfully implemented Natero here?

Scott Hopper

@Brian Hartley, no wrong answer. I was just wondering if there was a particular way Success was using Jira that you felt it might require measurable headcount to get what you needed from it.  Is Hubspot primarily used for campaigns. 

Scott Hopper

@Shaun Porcar I could see BI eating up a bunch of peoples bandwidth. 

Scott Hopper

Is that Support Ticketing on Zendesk? 

Alex Turkovic

In our org, Zendesk is used for a variety of things including support ticketing. It is also being used in our Professional Services department as a project tracker and other various 'intake' functions where a ticket is necessary.

A common scenario we use it for is if a customer needs to submit information into various workflows via email. That email address can be tied into a new 'ticketing queue' in Zendesk, after which those tickets can be manually worked or automated to do other things with tools like Zapier.

Alex Turkovic

@Scott Hopper ^^

Brian Hartley

@Scott Hopper At a previous role we used Jira to manage CS proejcts and time tracking, could have benefited from a resource to help manage.  In my current role, it is primarily ticketing and roadmap workflow.  Yes, Hubspot is campaigns.

Chris Jones (CJ)

100% Salesforce... having Salesforce without a team focused on getting the best out of it is so frustrating because you see how a few changes could make you more productive but it just never happens.

Internally I would also put communication/collaboration tools in that too (i.e Teams, Jabber, Slack, etc) if these tools are effectively managed they can become more of a burden than a benefit. 

Scott Hopper

@Chris Jones (CJ) 100% get where you are coming from.  From my IBM experience,  you want to move forward but it's so much effort to clear all the hurdles to do a few positive things.  But,  also from the IBM side even with something like Instant messaging there were all kinds of people doing  tertiary client (client/server) projects that could bring down the environment, Which ended up creating a Client ID  for our Sametime product so you could freeze out potential unwittingly malevolent clients that were causing the environment grief.   

So it's a balance, but yeah getting a resources time can be very difficult.    

But maybe this points out that these tools are being under head-counted when there deployed and it takes effort to up the headcount in these areas. 

Michael Haygood

To me, in re: Gainsight or other CS narration/aggregation type tools specifically, the way I‘ve seen it done most successfully is when administration from a Biz. Sys. or specific backend admin type team due to the potentially complex nature of the ETL’s and data flows required. Usually those that touch the entire business to some extent and separately a PoC within the CS Org. who is simultaneously working to define team specific workflows, internal adoption and value! 

Scott Hopper

So to a larger degree, they rely on other back-end teams to participate in building the launch schemas. What about post deployment what is the reliance on these teams after deployment?  

Michael Haygood

The dependency lessens a tad once the initial implementation is delivered, but continuous improvement/maintenance will always be needed, and due to the evolving nature of data in general there is always the quest for more. As well as continuing to develop richer automations to solve business challenges that require integration work, for example our reporting was done via Domo, Biz Sys owns Domo, “customer data” flowed from a data lake to GS to Domo, managing those connections and ingesting new sources specifically for customer reporting i.e. customer usage or health scoring, became a full-time job.