Situation:

Achieve3000 is the leader in online learning solutions for the K through 12 education market and an Insight Partners portfolio company.  The leadership team at Achieve3000 put in place an overall strategic plan to accelerate their market leadership and build an operationally world class Software as a Service company in the education technology space.  As part of this journey, their team put a particular emphasis on the customer success and account management function.

Opportunity:

As the customer advocacy team was growing and scaling, the Achieve3000 leadership team recognized an opportunity to reach world class levels in retention and expansion within their customer base.  To realize this outcome, the leadership team put in place a plan to transform the organization from a service based engagement model to a more proactive, predictive, outcome and success based engagement model.

The leadership team was experienced in SaaS and education technology, but realized that an outside perspective would help them get to world class capability levels faster than they could on their own.  Additionally, the leadership team recognized that partnering with an organization that had industry wide experiences and best practices in customer success and account management would bring new and fresh ideas into the organization.  This is when Achieve3000 chose to partner with SOAR Performance Group.

Approach:

The SOAR team partnered with Achieve3000 on a three phase approach to accelerate retention and growth:

1. Rapid Engagement: the SOAR team reviewed the current metrics and processes utilized within Achieve3000 and had deep dive Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee interviews. These revealed several critical perspectives that informed the rest of the initiative.
2. Accelerated Launch: the SOAR team took the key insights from the first phase and tailored a Customer Excellence playbook. This playbook integrated both SOAR world class content and best practices, Achieve3000 best practices, and new perspectives learned during phase 1. The SOAR team also leveraged the SOAR best practice account prioritization framework and tool to enable the Achieve3000 Customer Advocacy organization to prioritize time and resource investments across the customer base.
3. Business Integration: Once the Customer Excellence playbook was tailored to fit Achieve3000, the SOAR team worked with the Achieve3000 organization to integrate the new approaches into their daily business. This took on two pathways.  First, the SOAR team trained the Achieve3000 Customer Advocacy organization on the Customer Excellence Playbook using a virtual live format including many different scenarios and breakout activities.  As one participant shared “This is great – I now have a clear roadmap for how to drive breakthrough results with my customers!” Second, the approaches from the Customer Excellence Playbook were automated within Salesforce.com to drive adoption and measurement of the new engagement model.

Results:

Within one quarter of deployment, the organization already saw >7% improvement in net retention and is forecasting greater than a $7 million business impact through improved retention and expansion during the first year of deployment.  Additionally, it has supported the organization in ramping additional headcount and scaling out the customer advocacy function.

Eight months after launch of the high impact adoption process, McGraw Hill, the learning science giant, announced the acquisition of Achieve3000 .  With this acquisition, McGraw Hill will offer a wider array of outstanding digital learning materials that serve teachers, engage students and drive better learning outcomes.