Customer Care Requires Us To Help Our Clients Capture Real Value: KINSHIP Digital CEO

Great customer support can be thought of as just being always there at the right time. That’s the view of Caitlin Green, CEO of KINSHIP digital — a local digital agency that has built a specialist practice around the Sprinklr customer experience platform and social data insights.

KINSHIP digital has seen first-hand how a commitment to strong client engagement — and a willingness to help clients derive real value from their technology investment — can pay dividends. The business has not lost a Sprinklr client in the last three years — a rare result in the SaaS marketplace, where retention often proves problematic.

According to Green, “The difference comes from the care and the time we put into working with the customers who utilise the platform. It is important to focus on the basics, like calling them back when they email us, or being sure we give them consistent customer success calls.”

The Sprinklr platform itself is also a key differentiator, she says. “It is acknowledged as a leader in enterprise social management platform category. However, it is never just the platform, but how you help your clients make the most of it.”

Her point is well taken. One of the biggest criticisms marketers in particular have of technology platform providers is that they don’t do enough work equipping them to make the most of their investment. A common refrain you hear at panels and roundtables is “It’s like I have a Ferrari in the garage, but no-one to drive it.”

Building Trust

Green says vendors can’t expect just to drop in the solution and hope the client works out how to get a return on their investment. It is the reason KINSHIP works so closely with Sprinklr, which has a much more trust-oriented view. Indeed, Sprinklr white-labels some of KINSHIP’s services to clients.

KINSHIP Digital CEO Caitlin Green

“The aspect of building trust is critical. If you have a trusted client relationship — where your client knows what you do, why you sold them the solution, and how it is going to improve their business — then you have either equipped the client to utilise the platform well themselves, or you are helping the client via a managed service.”

According to Laura Fu, Senior Director, Global Product & International Operations at Sprinklr, “A big part of Sprinklr’s success comes not just from positioning of the product but also from the value realisation of the services.

“The true value of managed services comes not just from the implementation but from helping clients use the platform.”

Green says adoption is critical in any engagement. “If our customers don’t fully adopt the platform then it’s hard for them to see value in it.”

For her part, Fu concurs. “We have our partners who are inside the platform constantly, working side by side with the actual customers. It’s easier for them to demonstrate to those customers how to extract real value from the platform as they are so familiar with how it works and how it has helped others before them.

“In practical terms, that could mean running a social listening desk for a client or performing triage of the data — so that management sees the data it needs, customer support has its needs met, and likewise marketing,” adds Green.

About The Author

Andrew Birmingham is the director of the Which-50 Digital Intelligence Unit of which KINSHIP digital is a member.