The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear: Where employees work is less important than what they’re capable of accomplishing.

Around the world, IT consumption strategies are changing. They’re increasingly focused on creating digital workspaces optimized around the employee experience. Subscription services are at the core of this shift — providing the flexibility for IT to use what they need, when they need it.

Over the years, Citrix has built a Customer Success model that helps customers drive adoption of their subscription services. Based on our experience and successes, we decided to share our methodologies with our partners through our Partner Customer Success Management (Partner CSM) program.

The program enables partners to:

• Stay engaged with their customers across the entire lifecycle journey
• Accelerate technology adoption by better understanding the end-user experience
• Discover additional service and license expansion opportunities
• Deepen customer relationships and build brand loyalty

“The Citrix Partner CSM Program has re-ignited stalled adoption, brought in additional service revenue, and is increasing renewals significantly. We stay engaged with the customer, maintaining a seat at the strategic decisions table. We’re continually demonstrating our value, and we’re also aware of and better positioned to win future projects.” – Rob Sims, Chief Technology Officer, Cetus Solutions Limited

Engaging Consistently with the Customer Over the Subscription Lifecycle

Customers frequently purchase transition and trade-up licenses, only to have them sit unused. For partners, the worst time to find out about underutilized licenses is when it’s time for renewal — by which point there have already been a number of missed engagement opportunities to mitigate the risk of churn.

“The lifecycle approach gives us a more aerial view of the customer’s business. This enables us to deliver greater value and most effectively help customers shift to Citrix subscription-based services.” – Nancy Pautsch, Chief Evangelist of Stakeholder Value & President, Envision IT

An important component of the Partner CSM program’s methodology is the Success Plan. The Success Plan framework covers the entire customer lifecycle. From guidance for leading strategic conversations with customers, to best practices for defining business goals and objectives, to benchmarks for tracking progress against the customers’ desired outcomes. The Success Plan outlines targeted milestones for the customer and guides them every step of the way — ultimately increasing usage of their subscription and improving end user adoption.

During the initial enablement period of the Partner CSM program, we help our partners build or enhance their current adoption motions. We work with our partners’ program sponsor to designate a Virtual Customer Success Manager (vCSM) who will lead the customer success motion.

vCSMs serve as the primary customer success contact within the partner organization. They are responsible for driving adoption, creating Success Plans, and holding ongoing strategic and tactical conversations with their customers — from onboarding through renewal. This continual engagement ultimately helps our partners lead more organic renewal conversations with their customers, so it becomes a simple transaction rather than big, complicated event.

“One of our customers was uneasy about making the transition to Citrix Cloud; they assumed the jump was too large. Having our in-house Citrix Virtual Customer Success Manager working with them at every step of the journey gave them the confidence to move forward.” – James O’Donovan, Account Director, Enterprise Solutions

A Citrix Expert Works with You Every Step of the Way

When a partner joins the Partner CSM program, they are assigned a Citrix Customer Success Manager who serves as their primary point of contact and who helps get them up and running.

The program kicks off with in-depth instructor-led training. We lead our partners through a deep dive of our customer lifecycle methodology, show them how to build Success Plans, and teach them how to leverage our supporting Customer Success playbooks.

“If I had to choose one benefit of the Citrix Partner CSM Program, it would be the team interactions between our customer success and service organization and the Citrix Customer Success Management Team. We’re seeing the Citrix program already playing an important role in the business side of discussions where salespeople may not have skills with this type of conversation.” – Paul Kunze, Vice President, Sales & Marketing, IntraSystems

Following the instructor-led training, we continue with a 13-week “excel” phase. During this stage, we provide coaching and support as the vCSMs start to work directly with their customers. We hold weekly calls to review the vCSMs’ progress with their customers, talk through milestones to help customers adopt their new solution, and provide ongoing guidance needed.

We also meet with partner vCSMs each month to assess their progress. We help them understand if their motions are driving increased adoption for their customers and use customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) tracking to provide feedback on customer engagements. If both aspects trend positively after the 13-week excel period, we award the partner organization with our Citrix Customer Success and Adoption Preferred Partner Badge.

“Our Citrix Partner CSM was always available to provide guidance. In fact, we still engage regularly, and whenever we have questions. The collaboration is very rewarding … literally.” – Michelle Stogsdill, Citrix Maintenance Portfolio and Customer Success, Burwood Group

Driving Adoption by Understanding End Users and the Employee Experience

Creating a digital workspace that best serves the employee experience is not a simple task. What does an employee, team, or department need to thrive? What are their specific challenges and expectations? What roadblocks currently stand in their way? The key to driving adoption is understanding and delivering a digital workspace that meets each end user’s needs.

Generally, it’s easy for customers to define the first end user group to onboard to a new solution. But engaging with that group, learning how they use the tool, and understanding how their rollout went can lead to identifying additional user groups or departments that could also benefit from the solution — bringing partners in front of new champions and expanding their customer footprint.

“Historically, our sales and technical teams engaged predominantly with customer’s technical teams. Whilst this works well for implementation it bypasses the end users who are, in many ways, the most important stakeholders. Ultimately it’s their needs and active usage that determine success or failure. By ensuring our Citrix Virtual Customer Success Managers are engaging stakeholders across the customer’s organization,. we’re reinforcing our role as a strategic business partner as opposed to simply an IT supplier.” – Tom Walker, Vendor Strategy Manager, Ultima Business Solutions

Discovering Opportunities for Expanding Licenses

Discovery discussions typically evolve organically in ongoing conversations with customers. And from our experience, we know that these discussions often uncover needs that can be answered by additional Citrix services or license expansions. That’s why discovery is built into our program.

Here’s an example. A partner’s customer purchased Citrix Workspace Premium Plus. But after reviewing the customer’s utilization dashboard, it’s clear the organization is only using the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service component of their subscription. So although the customer is paying for all the other products within Workspace, their end users aren’t using them for some reason. Through the training and enablement provided throughout the Partner CSM program, the partner will know what to look out for, how to spot a utilization gap like this, and what actions or solutions to recommend to help their customers unlock even greater value from their Citrix subscription.

“We have an on-premises client that decided to trade up to Citrix Workspace service on Citrix Cloud, but they had very little understanding of the benefits to their business. Our Virtual CSM was able to build a Success Plan that strategically mapped out their journey. Through the building and execution of the Success Plan, we were able to have more conversations with their executives about business objectives on a more regular cadence. Since the completion of the project, the client has added more licenses to meet their remote workforce demands and used Entisys360 for additional design and migration services. We’ve also uncovered opportunities for workforce optimization with microapps.” – Al Solorzano, Vice President, End User Computing, Entisys360

Building Tighter Relationships in a More Flexible World

Many Citrix partners already have excellent sales and professional services businesses. But across the board, throughout the entire customer journey — from consideration, purchase, implementation, and ongoing management — we see a huge opportunity for partners to build stronger relationships with their customers by driving adoption.

Our Customer Success methodology supports end-user achievement and satisfaction — not only driving active usage, but also supporting our customers’ business goals and aligning Citrix services to their imperatives. Driving this return for customers builds their confidence and strengthens their relationships with their partners — helping to further position our partners as true trusted advisors.

“The Citrix Partner CSM Program helps us focus on business outcomes and address end-user needs. We’re accelerating the time-to-value for our customers with the program. This has improved customer loyalty while increasing our revenue and profitability.” – Al Solorzano, Vice President, End User Computing, Entisys360

To learn more about our Partner CSM Program, or for more information about how to apply, talk to your Partner Account Manager and review our program brief.

We would like to extend a special thank you to the early adopters of our program: Cetus Solutions Limited, Entisys360, Enterprise Solutions, Burwood Group, Envision IT, IntraSystems, and Ultima Business Solutions.

— Megan Nguyen, Lead Program Manager, Citrix Customer Success Management