Enabling Self-Sufficient Customers Through Community and Digital Onboarding

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Hello everyone, good afternoon.

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Welcome to the last session of the day.

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My name is Nurgis Appelie and I am

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a Gain Site Customer Success Manager for CE.

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Today, I'm super excited to bring on to stage the Muse team.

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I will start with Sarah Masterton-Brown.

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She is the Head of Community.

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Brenna O'Neill, she's an Instructional Designer Lead,

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and then Patrick McRudin who is a Gain Site Admin.

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So welcome on stage.

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Thank you.

0:37

Thanks everybody.

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Thank you so much for staying for this last session.

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I'm sure we're all tired and weary.

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But hopefully you get three for the price of one.

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So we have some impact.

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And I'm hoping you can take some tips and things away

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with you before you head home.

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So let's introduce ourselves.

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Yes.

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So my name is Brenna O'Neill.

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I'm the Instructional Design Lead at Muse.

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I've been with Muse for three years,

1:01

and I've been in the customer education, learning

1:04

and development industry for seven years.

1:07

I was also the project manager for the Digital Onboarding

1:10

Project, which I will talk about later in the presentation.

1:13

So I'm Patrick McRudin.

1:15

I'm Gain Site Admin.

1:17

I've been at Muse for over 18 months.

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I've also worked at a couple of other companies

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over the last five and a half years as Gain Site Admin,

1:25

starting out actually in my career with Gain Site

1:29

as a Digital Touch CSM.

1:31

So I've started in the CSM role, progressing

1:36

the admin role, trying to understand the entire journey.

1:40

So that's been really fascinating.

1:41

And I look forward to attending many more pulses

1:45

to learn a lot more about how we can improve here.

1:48

I'll pass over to Sarah.

1:50

Thanks.

1:50

And I'm Sarah Marston Brown.

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I've been working with Muse for three years in community land

1:56

for about 10.

1:58

I've launched two SaaS communities.

2:00

And yeah, we're here to talk about enabling self-efficient

2:04

customers through community and digital onboarding.

2:09

So just a quick bit about Muse.

2:11

Muse is a cloud-based property management system

2:15

for the hospitality industry.

2:17

So if you are not local, you might

2:21

be staying in a hotel.

2:22

Maybe they're one of our Muse customers.

2:25

So we have property management systems

2:29

that are there to help customers make their guest

2:34

journey really remarkable and digitalize it.

2:38

We want our customers to be able to not

2:42

be hiding behind a desk, looking at a computer screen.

2:45

So we want to automate as many of their business operations

2:49

as possible with our software.

2:53

And of course, if we talk about Muse,

2:55

we would be remiss to not talk about the growth

2:57

that we've experienced.

2:59

So Muse has been around for about 12 years now.

3:02

And you can just see how much we've grown.

3:06

We've had multiple series funding series totaling $340 million.

3:12

We actually also achieved unicorn status earlier this year,

3:16

which is very exciting.

3:18

And we've also acquired 10 different companies

3:21

over the time that Muse has been around.

3:25

So quite rapid growth.

3:27

And I think Sarah, Patrick, and myself

3:30

will talk about the challenges that came with that growth

3:32

and some of the solutions that we've been able to find.

3:38

Yeah.

3:38

So I think as well, what does customer self-sufficiency

3:42

mean for Muse?

3:42

And I think the pathway to customer self-sufficiency

3:46

involves clear onboarding.

3:47

Comprehensive training and accessible support resources.

3:52

One of the main things we've engaged with

3:54

is our active community, managed by Sarah.

3:57

And looking at how we can continuously educate our customers

4:03

and also empower them to do it themselves as well, self-serve.

4:07

So we've looked at all of this and brought it all together.

4:13

So I'm going to kick things off and just

4:15

talk to you a bit about the community and how we

4:18

enable self-sufficiency for our customers

4:20

using our community.

4:23

So with any big project, you need

4:25

to look at the challenges right before you start fixing problems.

4:28

You need to know exactly what they are.

4:30

And I was going with the pulse theme that we have this year.

4:34

And I have these three gentlemen and a baby

4:36

Mary to help me visualize this situation.

4:39

So really, what we were trying to solve

4:41

was an overload of work that we had from our support team

4:46

who were tackling few too many knowledge tickets

4:50

that were coming from customers who were trying to answer.

4:54

Questions from customers where there was just a knowledge gap.

4:56

They didn't know where to find the answer.

4:59

And it was also quite a time consuming process

5:02

to gather feedback from our customers as well.

5:04

There was no central place for us to do this.

5:08

Also isolation.

5:09

So we have, at the time, without a community,

5:13

we had an untapped customer knowledge base.

5:18

Our customers, some of them have been using our product

5:22

for over 10 years.

5:23

And there is so much experience and knowledge

5:24

that we really wanted to share with the rest of our customers.

5:28

And it was a long process to connect them with each other.

5:31

And then there were inefficiencies.

5:33

Customers facing the same challenges,

5:35

and they were just feeling like they were on their own.

5:37

We have a help center with thousands of articles in there.

5:41

But it's not the place where customers

5:45

can ask a lot of questions.

5:48

And there were also-- it was unscalable.

5:50

So with a high volume of knowledge base support tickets,

5:52

we just couldn't keep going at this rate.

5:55

Music's growing.

5:55

We can't keep throwing people at this problem.

5:59

I'm sorry I think I was getting carried away with the steam

6:02

when I did this presentation.

6:03

So looking at the solution and what the community can actually

6:07

solve here, the community represented a central resource

6:11

of information where customers would come and share best

6:15

practice.

6:16

They were able to engage in the content.

6:18

It created efficiencies, making their quicker resolution

6:21

from support, not having to answer all of the tickets.

6:27

And then making connections, customers

6:30

discussing topics of interest together,

6:32

sharing their knowledge, and building

6:33

their own professional networks.

6:36

So this was really enabling self-sufficiency

6:39

for our customers.

6:40

So along came the Muse community, which we launched two years

6:43

ago.

6:44

Ultimately, we wanted to create this community

6:49

to solve some KPIs for us, which was providing fast access

6:53

to support and give ideas through community interactions,

6:57

reduce the number of support tickets,

6:59

and leading to quicker resolutions for our customers,

7:02

and drive increased revenue through expanded product usage.

7:06

So we wanted to empower our customers

7:08

through the self-support and connect them with each other.

7:12

So just a bit of a pathway to self-sufficiency,

7:15

so what the process was that I went through

7:18

before we launched the community.

7:19

And this is quite a key part of what I did

7:22

was the research phase was very important.

7:24

When I started at Muse, we didn't already have a community.

7:28

I wanted to speak to as many customers as I could.

7:30

So I went to my CSMs, and I said, can I please

7:32

have a list of all of our happy customers who

7:34

will be willing to talk to me.

7:37

So I got on the phone to quite a number of customers

7:39

and told them that this is what we were aiming to do.

7:42

And I wanted their feedback.

7:43

I really wanted to understand what value

7:45

and they would get out of coming to the community.

7:48

It was no good me going off and building this thing

7:50

that nobody would actually come and use.

7:52

So speaking to all of these customers,

7:54

really did set the scene and get me some early adopters.

7:57

So I did a soft launch with them, got them into the room,

8:00

got them talking with each other and sharing best practices.

8:03

So when I did a big global launch,

8:05

the room was already full of people talking with each other.

8:07

So that was a big tip for me.

8:11

And then it went on to launch.

8:12

And in the top right, there's a quote

8:15

in one of our early posts where a customer says,

8:18

wow, this actually works because they'd come and ask

8:20

the question, a customer had answered it

8:23

within a couple of hours.

8:24

And they'd posted back and said, this actually works.

8:26

So that was a big moment of relief.

8:30

And I'm going to talk to you a bit about a couple

8:32

of programs and campaigns, maybe to inspire you

8:34

of how to kind of keep engaging customers

8:37

with our community and the outcomes of driving

8:40

that self-service.

8:41

We're now 2,500 members and the key events

8:44

that I'll quickly run you through.

8:47

So we have our customer journey, which is very important.

8:50

We run this on game site.

8:52

We use our journey orchestrator for this.

8:55

We have several stages through our customer journey,

8:57

which are very important.

8:59

And I speak with our customer operations team

9:02

and our customer success people to make sure

9:05

that the community pops up in lots of communication points

9:08

during this journey.

9:10

I need to make sure that the content that we're providing

9:13

in the community actually hits certain touch points

9:15

in this journey so that customers are continuously

9:18

reminded that there is great content there.

9:20

This is where they need to come for help and support.

9:24

And through this journey, we see great results.

9:27

We see customers who are engaging in these communications.

9:31

The support tickets reduce by 60%.

9:35

And over the time that we've had the customer journey going,

9:37

there's just been an increase in engagement of 72%.

9:40

So it really is driving some fantastic engagement.

9:45

A couple of things that I do additionally

9:47

to drive engagement and really deliver value for our customers.

9:50

This is actually one of the things that the customers asked

9:53

for.

9:54

I'd say it's probably in about the third month

9:57

of launch.

9:59

There are about 10 customers that created

10:01

a thread of a particular product feature

10:04

they weren't very happy with.

10:05

And they had some feedback on it, quite strong feedback.

10:08

One of them created a Google spreadsheet

10:11

and asked the other community members

10:13

to put their thoughts into the spreadsheet.

10:17

And I sent this spreadsheet off to the product manager.

10:19

I'm not quite knowing what response I was going to get.

10:22

But we had this community.

10:23

And before I launched it, I did let everybody

10:25

know that be aware that this is going to create some feedback

10:30

for you.

10:31

But through this, the product manager

10:34

entertained the idea of us all getting on a call

10:36

with these customers.

10:37

And over the course of an hour, they shared the product manager

10:41

listened.

10:42

It was a bit sticky at points, but it

10:44

was in a professional setting.

10:46

And as an outcome, some great things happened.

10:49

I think the product manager really found value in this feedback.

10:52

And the customers really felt heard and listened to.

10:55

And it was a really great moment.

10:57

A really good thing came out of this.

11:00

Another program that I run is our panel series.

11:03

So every month, I invite some of my really engaged community

11:07

representatives, customers, to come and join a panel,

11:10

just to discuss some thought leadership topic.

11:12

And I think it gives them a moment in the spotlight.

11:14

And they actually really do appreciate it.

11:18

So talking about the outcomes, what this all actually means,

11:21

when we're talking about self-sufficiency,

11:24

these are the numbers where we have customers resolving tickets.

11:28

So these are customers not going to support.

11:30

They come into my community asking the question.

11:33

And with that wonderful game site feature

11:35

where I can see their peer-to-peer resolution of tickets,

11:39

I get that number every week, every month.

11:42

It's gone up to 53%.

11:43

So this is-- it's really working.

11:45

But it takes a lot of time and energy.

11:47

But we're driving forward.

11:48

And I can see the results, which is great.

11:51

We also have our beta program in there as well.

11:55

So this is a fantastic, successful group

11:57

where our product managers are willing to come and participate.

12:00

Instead of me constantly reminding them,

12:02

they are now coming to the community

12:04

and posting their beta programs themselves.

12:06

Customers are self-nominating to go

12:09

into these beta programs, which is saving

12:10

the PMs lots of time and energy and going to finding customers

12:14

to join their programs.

12:17

Advocacy, this is Mick from one of our customers.

12:20

He has been such a great advocate in the community.

12:22

So in May, we awarded him with this wonderful--

12:25

this is the first community award.

12:27

And we're going to do the same thing every year from now on.

12:30

And yeah, we've gone to town with all the PR,

12:32

but that was what it was for.

12:34

So that's great.

12:36

And we'll keep this program going.

12:41

And then the community has initiated

12:43

a lot of great features.

12:44

The feature requests, it's proving

12:47

to be a lot more successful.

12:48

There's so many but more rich use cases coming through the community.

12:52

Great discussions that the product team are really

12:54

getting great value from this hearing.

12:56

And the roadmap, obviously, that's something

12:58

that can be a bit ambiguous to customers.

13:01

But I think through the community,

13:02

it's forced us to be a lot more transparent.

13:05

And just looking ahead, segmentation,

13:08

we are kind of segmenting our customers.

13:10

We have so many different segments.

13:12

And I find it a bit mind-boggling sometimes.

13:14

But this is something that we're going to pay a lot more

13:16

attention to in 2025.

13:17

And I'm going to try and design a lot more programs around this.

13:20

Q&A, I just want to make that a lot stronger

13:22

and hopefully get answers a lot quicker

13:24

to our customers through the community

13:26

so I can build that trust and keep getting more customers there.

13:29

Multilanguage is something that we are global.

13:31

Our customer base is global.

13:33

So that's something that's quite important

13:34

that hopefully we can get that really big bit of functionality

13:38

from game science so that we can deliver that in our community.

13:41

And I am in what's to say.

13:42

There's lots to do there.

13:44

So there we go.

13:45

That's all from me.

13:46

Over to you, Brenna.

13:47

Thank you.

13:49

Thanks, Sarah.

13:51

So another project that we've done at Muse

13:53

to enable our customers to be self-sufficient

13:55

is digital onboarding.

13:58

And of course, I told you at the beginning a little bit

14:00

about Muse's growth.

14:02

But I really think it's important to put us

14:04

in the context of what the problem was

14:06

and what our situation was that really required a solution.

14:10

So you can see just how much Muse has scaled.

14:15

And as from 2020, even with the global challenges,

14:20

especially in hospitality, the amount of scaling

14:25

is just quite rapid, as you can see.

14:29

We currently have more than 5,000 customers worldwide

14:32

in more than 85 countries.

14:35

And that hundreds of thousands number--

14:37

I wonder, Patrick, Sarah, do you know what that might refer to?

14:42

I can't remember.

14:44

I'm blanked on it.

14:44

So that's actually the number of guests

14:48

who are checked into Muse Hotels every day.

14:51

So some of you in the room might have been checked

14:53

into a Muse Hotel this week in Amsterdam.

14:56

Now, with that rapid growth, of course,

14:59

came challenges when it comes to onboarding and training.

15:04

So a lot of the processes that our onboarding managers

15:07

were going through were very repetitive, time-intensive,

15:12

resource-intensive.

15:14

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

15:17

Probably.

15:19

And with that rapid growth, of course,

15:21

the demand from Muse kept increasing, which just

15:25

made it harder for our onboarding team

15:27

to be able to keep up with that growth.

15:30

So we really needed to change.

15:32

We had to look at our current onboarding processes

15:36

and kind of either start fresh, see what we could do

15:40

to scale accordingly.

15:41

At Muse, our onboarding managers are very passionate

15:49

about ensuring that our customers, the hotels,

15:52

can transition smoothly onto Muse,

15:55

that they are trained, knowledgeable, capable

15:59

of utilizing all of Muse's capability and services.

16:04

But what happened during the onboarding process,

16:07

as I mentioned before, time-intensive, resource-intensive,

16:10

it was very manual.

16:12

So our onboarding managers were having

16:14

to manually schedule calls, spend hours on calls, walking

16:20

customers through the configuration process.

16:24

I see nodding that probably sounds familiar to a lot of you.

16:27

And that's a problem that you're facing as well.

16:31

And they were also providing one-on-one training to customers.

16:34

So a lot of times repeating the same information

16:37

multiple times to different teams.

16:41

Of course, it's not just time-intensive.

16:45

It's just not scalable.

16:46

Let's see here.

16:51

The demand for Muse was growing.

16:53

So right from the sales and customer growth side,

16:57

we were really increasing scaling quite a bit.

17:00

But the onboarding stage was becoming a bottleneck.

17:04

The average time to onboard was 67 days.

17:10

So that, of course, had repercussions

17:13

on activating customer revenue for Muse.

17:16

Each day that a customer spent onboarding

17:20

was a day that the customer's revenue was impacted,

17:23

and that Muse was not actualizing the revenue

17:25

for that customer.

17:26

So we can't come to the solution now.

17:33

We came up with digital onboarding.

17:36

This is a revolutionary self-service method

17:40

which allowed our customers to really control

17:43

their onboarding process.

17:45

And I'd like to tell you about it from the perspective

17:48

of a customer.

17:49

This is an example of what a typical small to medium-sized

17:54

hotel, what their experience might be.

17:56

So in the corner here, we have Miss Aedes Emma.

18:01

She is the general manager of a boutique hotel here in Amsterdam.

18:05

Her property is known for being on the cutting edge

18:08

of technology, always wanting to be kind of revolutionary,

18:11

up with the trends.

18:12

And she has decided to transition to Muse,

18:17

and has chosen their digital onboarding type.

18:23

So what Muse was able to do, as opposed

18:26

to traditional systems, which would

18:28

require on-site configuration weeks or even months

18:33

of back and forth, Muse enabled Emma and her team

18:37

to configure their system themselves in their own time.

18:41

And Muse didn't just stop at the configuration.

18:49

So to ensure that MS staff was also

18:51

trained and confident to use the system,

18:54

they used Muse University, which is the perfect complement

18:57

to digital onboarding.

18:59

So compared to days or even weeks,

19:03

Emma's team was able to be trained in just hours.

19:06

So that combination of in-app guidance,

19:09

which you can see an example of here in the system,

19:13

along with those interactive courses,

19:15

really ensured that Emma and her team

19:18

could learn and practice simultaneously

19:21

to increase their confidence, get up and running quickly.

19:27

So we can really see here that digital onboarding

19:30

with Muse University have really revolutionized

19:33

how properties onboard, providing

19:36

fast self-service solutions that really empower teams

19:40

from day one.

19:41

And I would like to show you some concrete results.

19:44

I didn't just make that up.

19:46

It actually has a basis.

19:49

So looking at some metrics, so the onboarding metrics,

19:52

I mentioned before that the average time to onboard

19:56

first standard onboarding, the onboarding process

19:59

that we had previously, was 67 days.

20:02

For customers who have gone through digital onboarding,

20:05

this average was actually reduced to 45 days.

20:08

So that's a 33% reduction in average time to onboard,

20:12

which is great.

20:13

I also mentioned how that time to onboard

20:16

was affecting revenue generation.

20:19

So for properties going through digital onboarding,

20:23

we were actually able to activate that revenue

20:25

48% faster.

20:28

So that's going from 112 days down to just 58,

20:33

which of course the business loves to see that.

20:36

So it's really clear from the data that we can see here

20:42

that hotels that undergo digital onboarding

20:44

are better trained, they're more capable,

20:47

and they're really empowered to self-serve.

20:51

And let's see one more data point here.

20:54

The support metrics.

20:56

So when we compare customers who have gone through digital

20:59

onboarding versus other onboarding types,

21:03

we can see a 61% reduction in support cases

21:06

during their first 90 days.

21:08

So from GoLive to their first 90 days with Muse.

21:13

Digital onboarding customers raise an average of 1 and 1/2

21:17

tickets compared to other customers who

21:20

go through other onboarding types, which

21:21

is an average of 3.8.

21:24

So a really big reduction there, which is great news.

21:28

Aside from that, we've also seen a 31% increase

21:32

in Muse University engagement.

21:34

And we really do attribute that to the increase

21:38

in self-sufficiency.

21:41

I'm sure now you're probably all asking, that's great.

21:44

How did you do it?

21:46

Well, thankfully, we have Patrick here too.

21:48

Tell us more.

21:49

Thanks.

21:52

Thanks to Sarah for explaining and setting

21:55

the scene and for Brenna to explain the kind of issue

21:59

that we've kind of looked to solve.

22:01

Thankfully, they've let me out from behind the screen

22:03

for a day here.

22:05

So I can kind of talk you through some

22:08

of what we've kind of done at a high level.

22:12

If I'm sure there'll be some of you who might reach out

22:14

for further information, I'll gladly kind of talk some of you

22:17

through that.

22:18

But I'll keep it fairly high level.

22:20

I know everybody's not hugely technical.

22:22

So essentially, as has been explained,

22:30

the issue is quite big.

22:31

There was a big buildup of pipeline

22:35

of customers waiting to be on board.

22:37

We needed to expedite these customers

22:41

through the pipeline somehow.

22:43

So we kind of looked at this with massive urgency.

22:49

It needed to be done.

22:50

We basically have given, I think it was a six-week deadline.

22:54

But at the time, the idea kind of came around,

22:57

and it was like, we need to have this in place.

22:59

So that scalability was crucial here.

23:05

We needed to add-- or we couldn't add more people

23:07

to the problem, as has been mentioned.

23:09

It's just not feasible.

23:10

It's not cost effective.

23:11

We needed to address the issue.

23:15

So another issue was we were kind of learning

23:18

PX, against IPX as we went.

23:21

So a lot of KC bot stuff, we had some exposure to it,

23:26

but we needed to learn as we went.

23:30

We had multiple stakeholders to manage here.

23:33

There's lots of different teams from obviously the onboarding

23:36

team, from the sales team, from our customer success team.

23:41

Everyone was kind of involved in terms

23:43

of trying to manage this process, set the expectations

23:46

for customers, and kind of understand

23:49

how we could roll this out.

23:52

Throw into the mix-- I think I was in the company

23:54

about three or four weeks.

23:55

I think whenever we kind of started looking at this,

23:58

it just added a little bit more complexity into the issue.

24:01

But we kind of looked at all this.

24:06

It's a huge challenge, but let's go for it.

24:08

We just kind of decided we'll see what we can deliver

24:12

in terms of a scalable solution.

24:14

So essentially, we kind of looked at the role of the KC

24:21

bot here as kind of our main kind of tool

24:26

that would be customer facing.

24:28

And as Brandon sort of explained already,

24:31

it's a step-by-step guide for the customers

24:34

that takes them through each of the steps to configure and set

24:37

up and sort of be in a position and be ready to go live.

24:43

The customer was able to-- customers

24:45

are able to onboard at their own pace.

24:47

There's not sitting in a queue.

24:48

We can kind of go, there's your platform.

24:52

You can go in.

24:52

You can start learning, start doing,

24:54

and starting setting up as you go.

24:58

It was reducing the resource strain immediately.

25:02

We kind of rolled out probably five or six pilot customers

25:08

with this process.

25:09

And the feedback was pretty immediate.

25:13

It was positive.

25:15

So it was something that we then rolled out.

25:18

And it's gained a bit of traction so far.

25:24

So just talking about the actual process

25:27

of how we've done this from a technical sort of perspective,

25:33

we obviously have the inside PX sitting on the music platform.

25:37

And we're collecting all of the usage data there.

25:42

We essentially have-- whenever somebody goes through the KC

25:46

bot and completes one of the stages there,

25:48

we will basically-- there'll be a webhook triggered.

25:51

And we'll basically collect that information

25:55

through the events framework in Ginsight.

25:59

We essentially have a real-time rule

26:01

that basically will write all of that information

26:04

in the custom object.

26:05

And we store that data so that we can then

26:09

run a scheduled rule every couple of hours

26:13

to essentially create a success plan, which we can then

26:18

track.

26:20

The progress of a customer through this,

26:22

because obviously we need to know exactly what the progress

26:27

is, how the customers are getting through it,

26:29

speed of what they're doing, et cetera.

26:32

And also be able to step in if somebody gets stuck.

26:35

So that's the main basis of it.

26:39

And obviously, there's a lot more in the background.

26:41

That's the view from way up here.

26:46

We also have a reporting off the back of this as well,

26:49

which kind of helps with everything here.

26:54

So that's the process.

26:58

We also then trigger, as we go throughout the process,

27:02

one of the last things is the customer basically requests

27:06

an audit, because obviously it's a pretty complex kind

27:10

of platform to set up.

27:11

You want to ensure it's all done correctly.

27:14

So before the customer goes live,

27:16

they'll request a system audit.

27:20

We basically have, again, triggered through webhooks.

27:24

We'll trigger a CTA for the onboarding team.

27:30

We will have a Slack notification that

27:32

goes to a Slack channel, which has all of the digital onboarding

27:35

team members in there, so that there's

27:38

visibility of this customer.

27:39

It feels like they're ready to go.

27:41

They need somebody to check.

27:43

So that's kind of happening real time.

27:46

And essentially they'll be able to go in, run the system audits,

27:50

kind of make sure everything looks set up.

27:52

And from there, they'll give the feedback to the customer

27:56

whether they're in a good position.

27:58

They need to do some additional work.

28:00

And basically from there, they can progress.

28:05

What have we sort of learned from this?

28:13

It's an iterative process.

28:16

It's constantly evolving.

28:19

There's much more that we can probably do, and probably

28:21

scale even faster.

28:23

And I think we're also able to then maybe look at other onboarding

28:27

types that we can also adopt this for.

28:30

I think with some of the things that we've seen this week

28:35

and heard about with AI technology,

28:38

we'll be able to factor into this as well, which will even

28:44

strengthen the process even further,

28:46

allow access to materials, resources much, much quicker,

28:52

much easier for the customer.

28:54

And I think it will, again, reduce the strain

28:59

on our onboarding team, making it easier for the customer

29:01

to onboard themselves, and hopefully have benefits

29:06

for not just ourselves, but for the customer as well.

29:09

And it's a win-win situation in that regard.

29:12

So I think from our learning and understanding of the process,

29:19

it's been really impressive in terms

29:23

of how the technology has helped us.

29:26

I think we've learned so much from feedback internally

29:30

and externally as well, that there's

29:33

things that we could probably do better.

29:36

But I think to get up and running in six weeks,

29:39

it wasn't a bad first effort.

29:41

We'll continue to evolve this.

29:43

And it's very kind of exciting.

29:47

So with that, I know there might be a couple of questions.

29:51

I'd just like to thank everybody for the time,

29:53

but if you have any questions, feel free to let us know.

29:58

[APPLAUSE]

30:03

Thank you so much, Mu's team.

30:05

So we'll start with our first question.

30:08

How do you handle customers with low customer value

30:11

who still want to receive traditional training one-on-one?

30:16

So I can take that one.

30:18

Customers are encouraged to use our Mu's university training

30:23

system that's available.

30:25

Within the Mu's university training,

30:28

there are live sessions that are run weekly

30:31

by our onboarding team.

30:33

So that's another thing that they're

30:34

encouraged to do first.

30:36

Have you done these options?

30:39

There are, of course, exceptions for training

30:42

as well for personalized training that can be offered.

30:47

So it's the exception to the rule, though.

30:49

But it can still be considered.

30:53

Next question, which KPIs do you use to measure self-service

31:00

success?

31:02

So I think we can look at obviously the time to basically

31:08

onboard, I think, is probably quite a significant one,

31:11

as was explained through the presentation.

31:14

Obviously, if the longer it takes us as a business

31:19

to start recognizing that revenue,

31:22

so we want to, obviously, measure the time.

31:25

One of the key things that we've actually identified

31:28

is the time in between each of the steps.

31:31

So how can we reduce that time as well?

31:35

And that's something that we're actually investigating

31:37

and trying to get better at in terms of,

31:40

are our customers getting stuck anywhere along the journey?

31:44

Can we improve that?

31:45

Do we need to, again, provide more material or resource?

31:49

Or do we need to do something better in the platform,

31:52

provide that feedback to the product team perhaps?

31:56

So time to value, essentially, the key metric here.

32:03

And outside of that, we can look at a couple of other things.

32:07

But I would argue that time is the time to value is the main one.

32:10

How are you educating customers to change their mindsets,

32:17

going from reaching out to your support,

32:19

to searching for a solution on your community platform?

32:24

Yeah.

32:26

By my approaches offering these programs

32:30

that I spoke to you about, really adding the value

32:33

to make sure that customers feel that when they come

32:35

to the community, they can connect with people

32:38

who are very similar to them, who they can talk to

32:42

and understand their problems and solve challenges

32:45

and make their response time a lot quicker.

32:49

I do see customers come into the community and say,

32:52

I come here because I get a quicker response than support,

32:55

which is sometimes the case.

32:58

So as long as I keep building that real value for customers

33:01

and not treating it like a marketing board for my company,

33:06

I feel like we are on a good road there.

33:10

Did you have any adoption hurdles where your customers

33:18

are potentially each other's competitors?

33:21

If so, what have you tried to overcome this?

33:26

Yeah, this came up quite a bit actually

33:28

when I was launching the community, customers did say,

33:32

yeah, potentially I could be talking to my competitors.

33:36

Yeah, absolutely.

33:38

But if you kind of, I feel if you go in with that

33:41

close-minded approach, you're only going to get

33:44

to a certain stage with things.

33:46

It's entirely up to the customer.

33:48

If they want to come and engage, they can.

33:50

We have some wonderful customers who are willing to come

33:53

and contribute and give great content.

33:55

They're the ones I'm going to nurture

33:57

and really engage with and build upon.

34:00

If you don't want to get involved in the conversation,

34:02

customers really don't have to.

34:04

So that's kind of the approach that I take.

34:06

I'm open to having discussions with anybody in community

34:09

who has a different view.

34:10

How would you moderate a multi-language community

34:17

without someone in your moderation team speaking a language?

34:20

Yeah, this is a great question.

34:23

We don't have full multi-language functionality

34:28

with the gamesite community.

34:29

I know it's in the works, so I'm desperate for that.

34:32

I'm first in the line.

34:34

The way we can currently, I have plans to build a team.

34:40

I work very closely with the advocacy manager.

34:42

And I also work with somebody in my team

34:46

who is building the Customer Advisory Board.

34:49

Anyway, the advocacy manager also has plans to build

34:52

the team in different regions around the world

34:54

to service our global different regions of our customer base.

34:59

I will also, the person that's going to work in the advocacy team

35:03

will also have part of their role

35:06

will be to come and moderate the community.

35:08

So these people will be multi-language.

35:10

So we will have a person in each of the regions

35:12

around the world.

35:13

So we are planning to grow quite significantly in 2025.

35:18

We have big plans to do that.

35:19

So yeah, we are.

35:20

We're getting that.

35:22

How do you define an onboarded customer?

35:29

What are the requirements metrics

35:31

to verify a successful onboarding?

35:34

Yeah, I think that's a really good question.

35:37

And it's definitely something that we've learned

35:39

along the way a little bit.

35:41

We did-- one of the issues that we actually did find

35:44

was some customers would maybe have tried to go live,

35:46

essentially, without requesting an audit,

35:49

without saying, by the way, we're ready here.

35:51

We're going to go live.

35:52

So one of the things that we have done

35:55

is actually worked with the product team.

35:57

We've added in basically a toggle that

36:00

allows us to basically say, go live or not.

36:05

So the audit has to be basically completed now.

36:09

And that has to be validated and verified

36:11

by the onboarding team.

36:13

Otherwise, they won't be able to accept bookings

36:16

through the platform.

36:17

So that's something that we make customers aware of now

36:20

and is part of that.

36:22

So that's kind of where a learning from the process.

36:26

But yeah, that would be how we would sort of define

36:29

the onboarded customer.

36:32

And once the audit is completed and the success plan

36:35

gets closed down, we'll kind of report on that as well.

36:38

And then next question, why are you not

36:43

deploying digital onboarding to all customers

36:46

since the results are so positive?

36:49

Yeah, again, another really good question there.

36:53

I think with hotels or other properties,

36:57

potentially you can have different complexities

37:00

in your setup.

37:03

You can have multiple properties being onboarded as well.

37:08

So I think we've worked with the sales team

37:12

to ensure that it's only sold to customers

37:17

that it's a good fit for.

37:20

If they realize and recognize that they

37:23

are a complex customer, it's not going to be a good fit.

37:26

It could cause issues down the line.

37:28

They might need-- they're maybe not as technical as other

37:32

customers potentially.

37:34

It's good for our sales team to be able to recognize that

37:37

quickly.

37:38

Our onboarding team, if it maybe does go through,

37:41

they can kind of quickly have that conversation go,

37:43

this is not the right product.

37:44

We want to ensure that you're set up for success

37:47

from the beginning.

37:48

And that's why we kind of aren't deploying

37:52

digital onboarding to all customers.

37:54

Saying that, we are taking some elements of it

37:57

and rolling that out to our standard onboarding.

38:00

So we're going to basically deploy the KC bot.

38:04

We've done this for our standard onboarding

38:06

to basically provide some of the resource

38:10

that we do provide through the digital onboarding.

38:13

But it's obviously customized to look more--

38:17

or not basically have the steps that you would have to complete

38:20

as a digital onboarding customer.

38:22

So that's something that we've actually just

38:25

done in the past few weeks.

38:28

And again, that's something that we're going to probably revisit

38:31

a couple more times moving into 2025.

38:33

I love this next question because it's probably mistakes

38:40

that you've made.

38:40

So what are things to not do when setting up a digital onboarding

38:45

program?

38:46

Don't do it in six weeks.

38:47

Pushback say no, it's not possible.

38:53

It was far too stressful.

38:59

I think anybody that was involved in that process

39:02

would probably agree with me.

39:04

Take a little bit more time.

39:06

Kind of set it up, think through exactly what you want to do

39:11

and what your outcomes are.

39:14

And make sure that you're entire--

39:16

anybody that's involved with the process fully

39:18

understands the workings of the digital onboarding.

39:23

Because we've kind of had obviously feedback

39:26

from internally as well.

39:28

Because I think we rushed-- not rushed out,

39:30

but it was probably quicker than I would have liked to do it.

39:34

The feedback was a lot of people didn't fully

39:36

understand how it worked, how the way of tracking things.

39:41

And that's probably one of the kind of main things there,

39:44

is that have the resource pushed out

39:47

to your internal teams, ensure that they fully understand it.

39:51

And essentially, don't do it in six weeks.

39:53

Take a bit more time.

39:55

I would just add to that as well.

39:56

From the starting line, don't skip the analysis stage.

40:02

Make sure, like what Patrick mentioned,

40:04

make sure you have your outcomes clear.

40:05

And from the outcomes, no--

40:08

kind of map it out, map out the stages

40:11

and exactly what can and should be digital

40:15

and what can maybe be elsewhere.

40:17

Like I mentioned, news university before,

40:19

we didn't try to stuff everything into the PX engagements.

40:25

We wanted to make sure that it was balanced with other resources

40:28

that would complement that information.

40:30

But we were able to determine what information should go where

40:33

because we took the time to do that--

40:35

and took the time in the six weeks

40:36

that we had to do that analysis stage.

40:40

Awesome.

40:44

Next question.

40:45

You mentioned Q&A in the community.

40:47

How did you decide what goes into the help docs

40:52

and what is posted in the community Q&A?

40:54

Yeah.

40:56

I think with community, it's a constant--

41:00

takes constant energy to make sure

41:02

that people aren't posting step-by-step guidance

41:05

about the product in the community.

41:08

We try not to do that.

41:09

We try and put things in articles first

41:12

and then give the article link in the response

41:14

to the community post.

41:15

But that can slow down the process.

41:17

I find that's quite hard to do.

41:22

And I also am trying to create more video snippet content

41:26

where somebody technical is talking

41:28

through a process on a screen and posting that in community.

41:33

I think that is a lot of a richer response

41:36

that someone's looking for.

41:38

It's a balance.

41:39

It really is one of those challenges

41:42

with running a community of making sure

41:43

that everybody that does contribute internally,

41:46

contribute to your community, doesn't come in and try

41:49

and give step-by-step guidance because that material age

41:52

is very quickly.

41:53

And then you're ending up with this horrible governance

41:56

thing on your hands, which you really don't want.

41:58

So I would say it's just trying to be really strict

42:03

with what content goes into community,

42:05

try and keep it high level.

42:06

Obviously, things are going to be discussed in the other step-by-step

42:09

guidance.

42:10

But try and stick with the process,

42:12

make sure these things go into help articles,

42:15

thank your customers for contributing to your knowledge base.

42:19

And yeah, that's that.

42:23

Good question.

42:25

OK, I think we have maybe two more questions.

42:28

We've got two minutes remaining.

42:29

So do your customers choose themselves

42:33

for digital onboarding during the sales process?

42:36

Or do you choose it for them via customer segmentation and why?

42:41

Yeah, I think it pretty much goes back a little bit

42:44

to what I said earlier.

42:46

The sales team will help advise on that front

42:49

whether they're a good fit.

42:51

We do have, obviously, the initial thought

42:53

was that it would be rolled out to our smaller SMB customer

42:59

based on their technical ability if they were able to go through

43:03

and set it up themselves.

43:06

We've kind of since moved towards bigger chain.

43:11

Perhaps they've gone through standard onboarding.

43:14

They maybe have a bit of know-how, how the platform works

43:17

and how they can set that up.

43:18

So they might go through, and basically

43:20

for any additional properties, they

43:22

might choose digital onboarding because they kind of know

43:24

what to do now.

43:26

So that's kind of where there's a little bit of choice

43:30

for the customer, but it's advised strongly

43:33

by our sales team on that process.

43:37

All right, I think this will be the last question of the day.

43:41

How have you integrated community user activity

43:44

into digital onboarding and vice versa?

43:49

Community data appears in the casey bot.

43:53

So customers look through the content.

43:57

Yeah, so I think as well, I'll just

44:00

add in terms of the integrated community user activity,

44:05

we kind of have, obviously, the data coming through

44:08

from community now.

44:10

And we kind of combine that within against ICS,

44:13

whether it's on the R360 or the C360.

44:16

So we can run our onboarding projects

44:18

through the R360 via relationships.

44:21

So we can kind of combine that information.

44:26

Obviously, we're trying to enrich the contact data

44:30

as much as possible.

44:31

So if we can get community data coming in there,

44:36

that's better.

44:37

It helps our understanding of the customer

44:38

and helps us hopefully do that better.

44:42

We are looking, obviously, at P360 to, obviously,

44:46

and add that hopefully this by the end of this year.

44:50

And that will, again, add further enrichment

44:53

for our internal teams to learn more about our customers.

44:57

Awesome.

44:58

Thank you so much to the MUSE team.

45:00

We really appreciate your time.

45:02

It was great.

45:02

Very insightful.

45:03

Thank you.

45:03

Thank you.

45:04

[APPLAUSE]

45:09

Awesome.

45:09

And thank you, everyone, for joining Pulse Europe.

45:11

We really appreciate your time coming out here.

45:14

Safe travels back home.