Jacky Saayman, Director, eMarketing and Programs, EMEA, OpenText

SuperNova Award Category

  • Next Generation Customer Experience
  • Technology Optimization & Innovation

The Company

OpenText is the leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM). EIM enables organizations to grow the business, lower costs of operations, and reduce information governance and security related risks. OpenText focuses on the key drivers of business success to improve business insight, strengthen business impact, accelerate process velocity, address information governance and provide security

The Problem

Over the past 6 years, SAP has been acting as a reseller of OpenText solutions. In many cases, these sales were done without any OpenText involvement, so we have no relationship with these customers. Many know little to nothing about OpenText, and few are aware of the many other solutions we offer, beyond those on the SAP price list. So our challenge was to:
- Identify and address contacts within joint OpenText / SAP customer base
- Welcome them to the OpenText family – ensuring a successful start to the relationship
- Educate them regarding the solutions they already have
- Educate them on extended OpenText product family
- Up-sell additional SAP solutions and cross-sell other OpenText solutions to this base

The Solution

The solution was to develop a process, a platform and the tools to enable us to onboard these customers, ensure their success and start cross and upselling into this base. The platform is a customer onboarding website, specifically personalised at both the individual and company level.

The Results

Before:
We'd receive a royalty report from our partner, say thanks and send them an invoice. No attempt would be made to contact these customers, assure their success with our products, or cross-sell them on the hundreds of other possible solutions we have that are not on the SAP reseller list.

After:
We've now developed a process whereby we identify the individuals at the end customer involved in the purchase, reach out to them in person, and add them in to an automated onboarding and nurturing campaign stream. They are directed to a personalised website which provides knows who they are, which products their company owns, and provides the right information for them. Implementation and support resources, tips and tricks for those solutions they have already purchased; marketing resources and ROI calculators for complementary solutions they don't yet own. And they are added to a nurturing track which regularly surveys to determine their implementation status and satisfaction, as well as promoting additional resources and possible complementary solutions.

This has already delivered immediate results, with customers appreciating the outreach and identifying new opportunities for solutions within and outside of our SAP stack. The project was piloted in EMEA, and has now been adopted worldwide based on the success. We expect the standardised royalty process and the ongoing automated nurture to continue to deliver results for years to come.

The Technology

A combination of technologies make up the core of this platform:
- Marketing automation technology - Eloqua, from Oracle
- CRM - SalesForce.com from SalesForce.com
- ROI calculators and assessment tools - Prospecteer from Demodia
- Customer surveys - TechValidate from TechValidate

Metrics

To date, the project has resulted in:
- 263% growth in identified contacts from this customer base
- 60+ new opportunities identified in this base, amounting to multiple millions of dollars of pipeline, of which roughly half is for solutions that are outside of the SAP solution stack.

Disruptive Factor

Onboarding customers, managing them through the customer lifecycle, and finding opportunities for cross-sell and upsell are not new concepts. But automating this process and applying it to a previously ignored customer segment has made a huge impact for OpenText, initially in EMEA and now for other regions of the business also. The new processes are now embedded in our monthly cycles and will continue to impact our customer relationships and our revenue for many years to come.

Shining Moment

Internally, we've received kudos from senior executives, who now want our corporate web presence to be as personal an experience, based on our own technologies. Externally, OpenText won a 2012 Killer Content Award in the category of Best Customer Relationship Enhancement for the personalised website. But the very best results come when we call our previously unknown customers and hear them say "we've been wanting to talk to you", "we love your solutions", or "what's taken you so long?"

About OpenText

OpenText is the leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM). EIM enables organizations to grow the business, lower costs of operations, and reduce information governance and security related risks. OpenText focuses on the key drivers of business success to improve business insight, strengthen business impact, accelerate process velocity, address information governance and provide security.

OpenText strives to...

  • enrich the way people use information
  • foster innovation
  • be trusted in our relationships
  • be committed to excellence in all that we do
  • work with our stakeholders, demonstrating honesty and passion towards common goals

Our customers’ success lies at the heart of everything we do. As a publicly traded company, OpenText manages and maximizes its resources and relationships to achieve this, helping more than 50 thousand global customers build digital enterprises by unleashing the power of information