The Vision for Customer Success at ComplianceBridge

Announcer: Welcome to the ComplianceBridge podcast. Your source for the latest on risk management and policy and procedure management. Now welcome your host, John Custer.

John Custer: Hello. This is John Custer, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at ComplianceBridge. Today we have a special guest, Mr. Brady Nelson, who is the ComplianceBridge Director of Customer Success. We’re going to talk to Brady, a little bit, about how his role in the company supports the ComplianceBridge vision and supports our ComplianceBridge customers. Brady, how are you?

Brady Nelson: I’m very well, John. How are you this afternoon?

John Custer: I am just great. And thanks for joining us. Well, tell us a little bit about your role and how it does support our vision with our customers.

Brady Nelson: Yeah. Well, certainly John. So, my role is all about having productive clients. So, the ComplianceBridge platform is very functionally rich. It has many capabilities. It’s also something that we work very closely with our clients to let them really get the most benefit and value that they can out of the platform. Bottom line is, we want them to achieve their business goals. In the overall world we’re in of compliance and policy and procedure management, it’s all about mitigating their exposure to potential compliance audits and things like that. So, it’s our understanding that some of our clients are somewhat underutilizing the platform. And so, we work with them on a variety of different programs to make sure they’re getting the most benefit out of it. And our bottom line is that we are always here to help them because we want them to realize that value from the application.

John Custer: Well, that sounds terrific. Let me ask one question. When does your team engage with prospective customers or new customers? How does that work?

Brady Nelson: So, we will engage with the client right up front, and it depends on the depth and the complexity of the application. For fairly straightforward implementations, you know, they might not have a lot of policies and relatively straight forward group and category and hierarchy structure, we can develop the implementation program for them very quickly. One of the things that’s changing at ComplianceBridge is that we are finding ourselves working with much larger clients, much deeper group category structures, much deeper policy requirements. And so, that shift in support has led us to a couple different things. We will, right at the start of engagement, work with our clients to go through a discovery session to understand their specific requirements and what they might entail, develop a statement of work that mirrors that so that we both know up front what are the services that we’re going to provide. Those are the deeper engagements. We also have developed, for some of our clients that want to get started rapidly, a program that we call Crawl Walk Run. Ant that’s all about very quickly getting the system up and running. Get some policies loaded, get users engaged, get users loaded. And we’ve even had a client here last week that, in a Crawl Walk Run application, got up and running in one day. They put a policy out, it was something that was very important and urgent to get to all of their 100 team members, and we did that in one day. So, it will vary but it varies on the size of the implementation and the complexity of that particular client’s organization.

John Custer: Okay. Interesting. What would be a normal implementation time? One day sounds marvelous, but is that regular or is that unique?

Brady Nelson: Oh, that’s very unique. That was a specific policy that a client needed very quickly. But, that’s just an example of how the platform can react very quickly to client requirements. I would say a normal implementation cycle runs four to six weeks, depending on whether they have an active directory integration requirement, single sign on integration requirement, and the number of policies. Many of our clients, when we start working with them, they’ve got to organize their policies and get them to us so that we go through a batch upload process. The one day, that’s a unique situation. But I would say four to six weeks is more typical for the average type of communication.

John Custer: Well, I would think that shows the flexibility of the system. Don’t you think?

Brady Nelson: The system is very flexible in that one of the things that we really work hard to achieve is we want to teach clients how to fish. We want to start with the implementation in which they know their business, we know our platform. But, as they become more and more familiar with our platform, they start taking control of system settings and email templates and setting up work flows. And so, it’s a transfer of knowledge from our Implementation Services team to the client that lets them start running. And, I would say, that is typically a four to six-month process before the client is fully engaged and driving on their own.

John Custer: That’s all interesting. You know, many observers of this industry consider the ComplianceBridge total compliance system to be the world’s most powerful compliance software. But your customers still choose to use additional support and services from ComplianceBridge. Why is that? What do they get from that?

Brady Nelson: That’s a great question. And there’s a couple different aspects of that. We have a couple different clients just recently, in the last month or so, that are utilizing the system very well. But they had severe and unique internal requirements that were based on the way that they used the system. So, they contacted us. We reviewed the requirements. And in those cases, we actually made a change to our codebase to accommodate the client even though, as I mentioned, it’s very functionally rich. Sometimes the clients have special needs, or they want one special function, so we have the ability to do that. Other times they’ll engage with us. You know, after they’ve already been up and running and productive, when they’re going to implement a new program, or they’ve made a corporate acquisition and they need to fold in a new acquisition into their team. And then, lastly, we’re always here. We often have changeover in our administrator personnel at the client side. And so, if a new administrator comes on, we’re here to help give them ancillary training and get them up to speed in the running so it’s a smooth transition from one administrative team to the other

John Custer: Talk about how you actually deliver the service. What’s the mechanics?

Brady Nelson: So, the services are delivered typically remotely. Larger implementations will have on site workshops, but for the most part our services are delivered. We use Go-To Meetings, and we’ll schedule a recurring session when they’re getting started. Say twice a week or once every other week, depending on their needs and their timeframe to get implemented. We’ll run those in one hour sessions. The one hour session will go into new implementation issues that they might have. We’ll get a list of things that we need to do, and they get a list of things they need to do. We go away and we come back, you know, a few days or a week later and address those new changes and then move on with additional ones. And everything, the benefit of ComplianceBridge’s SAAS based model is very powerful. We can log on to any of our clients’ systems and access them from anywhere as long as you’ve got a fast internet connection. So, we we’ll run it when we have Go-To Meetings. We’ll log to their instance of the platform. Our server is based in Dallas, and there is a very powerful server there. But it doesn’t matter since the SAAS model allows you to be anywhere in the world. And we can be implementing, bug fixing, whatever we may need to do on their specific platform.

John Custer: Very good. I’m a customer. I’ve had my initial training and your group has provided some services. But now I’ve had turnover of my people. I’ve added additional people. We require some modifications or integration. Do we come back to you for that too?

Brady Nelson: Absolutely. And that’s why we’re here. That’s very common occurrence John.

John Custer: I would think so.

Brady Nelson: Yeah. That’s a very common occurrence. And, it might not even be a person leaves an organization, but they might get promoted or they might go to another job function or something. So, we offer a continual training environment that we will provide a specified number of training sessions over the course of a year just for things of that nature. Additionally, just from a continuing education perspective, we’ve recorded a series of webinars. We did this earlier this year, January to late March. We recorded webinars. And they’re all available. Those webinars are very useful. They address different topics within applications, such as how to create a workflow, how to create a group or category structure, what it means, and how to edit their email templates. Those are all available to them. So, if they need a refresher or if they need to just brush up on a certain topic because they’re going to now address forms for instance, they have those additional webinars available to them 24/7 in their portal.

John Custer: Well, it sounds like it’s one-stop shopping. And it really sounds well thought out. But what happens if my requirements change in the future? Who do I call? Who do I reach out to?

Brady Nelson: That’s support@compliancebridge.com. That’s the email that you would send something to. And let us know what those new requirements are. Many times, they’ll be something as simple as you’ve got a new policy handbook that you want implemented. And we’ll work with you to get that uploaded and distributed out for acknowledgment to the user base or the information consumer. If there are deeper implementation requirements, if they’ve got a new requirement change, we’ll work with them as well to define that and then deliver those services. But we really strive to do that because, again, as we started the podcast our goal is satisfied clients that are getting productivity out of their environment. So, that’s a fluid, the nature of those is to be very fluid and to continue to make it applicable to the challenges that they face in their everyday business environment.

John Custer: Well, this sounds great. The customer’s success and support that you all give to your customers and perspective customers really sounds well thought out. And Brady, I would like to thank you for your time today. Thank you very much.

Brady Nelson: John, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you and I’ll talk to you soon. And for a lot of the clients or perspective clients out there that are looking for support, feel free to engage us. We’re here to help.

John Custer: Thank you Brady.

Brady Nelson: Thanks very much.