Takeaways from the Customer Advisory Board
Pravin Kothari
I just returned home from a week in Washington DC where we held a regional Customer Advisory Board meeting and a CISO Roundtable event.
It was great to spend time with some of our customers from up and down the east coast and even one all the way from Utah. Significant number of our customers from various industries including financials, healthcare, federal, Canada, etc. attended the meeting. We discussed our product roadmap and vision and received excellent validation and feedback. Most of the customers presented their deployments and success stories. It was also a great chance for the customers to hear about each other’s projects and discuss lessons learned. Kudos to our customer support and professional services teams, which earned universal high praise from our customers. Some high level feedback and observations from the Customer Advisory Board:
- Plan big but start small: All the customers had a great deployment strategy. They all bought Agiliance’s product because they had a vision of an enterprise GRC platform, a platform that can address all their GRC needs across the enterprise. However, they all had a very realistic deployment strategy. The key is to start with a very precise project with a very precise business benefit. Demonstrate value to the business and gain support for the tool, then broaden the usage. Many of the customers in attendance are on their second and third phase of deployment. Customers typically start with 1 to 2 of their use cases and then grow from there.
- No one can afford customization any more: The impact of this down economy is still very real. Everybody has less resource than before. Customer expectations have clearly changed. Customers want a product that works out of the box, that is easy to use, is easy to administer, and easy to upgrade. No one can justify large consulting bills year-in and year-out, even the large financial services and federal customers who have historically done a lot of customization to the products they buy. Customers want a product that works and not leave the main task as an exercise for them.
- Automation is no longer a nice-to-have: Compliance is still the number one driver for customer’s adoption of GRC technology. The burden of regulatory and contractual compliance is driving customers to automation. Everyone at the meeting agreed that there is no way their sizable organizations can maintain any resemblance of compliance without the help of technology. Resource and budget is just too limited vs. the responsibility they have to meet. Customers want to offload manual, repetitive and non-value-add work from their staff, improve efficiency and focus more on their business needs.
A big thank you to the customers who attended this Customer Advisory Board meeting and provided valuable feedback to help us continue to grow the product and company. I will summarize the key takeaways from the CISO Roundtable event once I get a chance to catch up from my week-long trip.
