Though my official title at Boomi is “chief operating officer,” my favorite role is being the company’s “chief customer success officer.”
In that capacity, I would first just like to say a huge “Thank You!” to our customers. We view our customer relationships as partnerships. Thank you for being part of the Boomi family, and thank you for being great partners.
As part of my work, I lead the customer support, customer success, and professional services groups. All together, they form the core of how we help our customers get the very best from their investments in our low-code, cloud-native integration platform.
This week’s Boomi World is a chance to make Boomi even more customer-centric and help our customers be even better at building their connected business. Whether you are attending or not (we hope you are and, if not, we will see you next year!), please reach out to talk to us. We are eager to listen.
Helping Our Customers Get the Most From Boomi
Our team’s goal is simple. Every day we wake up, we think about how we can improve the experience of being a Boomi customer. This is what our team lives and breaths. Everything we do embodies that statement.
Whether it is a new customer that needs to introduce our platform to their organization or an existing customer that wants to explore new ways to use Boomi to drive digital transformation, we are focused on helping organizations build best of breed integration practices.
We do that in two ways. First, it is by meeting customers’ support needs just as quickly and effectively as possible. So that’s about classic support help with how-to or troubleshooting guidance. We want to be peerless in how we deliver these fundamental services.
Just as important, we are equally focused on proactively identifying our customers’ needs, often even before they are aware they have them. We can do this from the insights possible through our true cloud-native, multi-tenant platform.
We’re continually harnessing our platform’s metadata to build out these artificial intelligence tools. We can look across the patterns, issues and practices of our more than 6,000 customers to understand what works and what doesn’t for enterprise integration.
We were first to market with AI for integration platforms more than five years ago. That leadership shows through in our current portfolio of AI tools, including our predictive assistance, Boomi Suggest, Boomi Assure, and Boomi Resolve. We like to refer to all these capabilities as “actual intelligence,” since they are designed to help our customers work faster, smarter and better.
And our current portfolio of AI tools is just the tip of the iceberg. With our large and rapidly growing install base, we will be offering even more proactive help and intelligent tools to our customers to simplify and speed their integration efforts.
How Boomi Is Customer-Focused
Beyond our teams and technology, the reason I love my role at Boomi is because of the commitment to customer success across the entire organization.
First and foremost, it starts with the product. We have an incredibly open dialog with our product group. Our teams help feed customer perspectives to them to inform both their short-term and long-term product development efforts. In all cases, their decisions are 100 percent guided by customer needs.
And, certainly, our customer-focus starts at the top with Chris McNabb, our chief executive officer. I’ve never been in a meeting — regardless of the part of the business — that Chris hasn’t asked, “What customers did you talk to? What did they say?”
These questions are paramount in everything we do. That ends up permeating the organization. Customer success is truly a company-wide effort. Chris holds every part of the organization accountable for every single customer’s success.
When our leaders are in meetings with their teams, what do you think they are going to ask? One of the first things we ask is how our efforts can help improve our current and prospective customers’ businesses. That’s the way Boomi works.
I’ve been a part of many different kinds of organizations, and Boomi’s persistent questioning throughout the company of “What does the customer think?” is unique in my experience.
Making Boomi Knowledge Easier
In this spirit, the customer success teams during the past year have undertaken key projects to significantly improve how Boomi customers can learn how to use our integration platform. And, as you might expect, these changes have been 100 percent guided by our customers.
The first project involved completely overhauling our training and certification tracks with a new online learning management system. It’s frictionless and free, complementing our ongoing face-to-face help and workshops.
What we heard from our customers loud and clear was that they wanted an easier and a quicker way to get steeped in Boomi.
So we completely overhauled the training and certification paths. They are now much more holistic. There’s a clear certification path for developers. Instead of a set of stand-alone classes, there are courses that build a depth of knowledge, culminating in various levels of certification.
Boomi’s hallmark is its ease of use, but it is still a software tool with vast capabilities and best practices associated with how to build integrations, manage master data and APIs, run EDI networks, and automate workflows. That’s a lot to know!
The better our customers understand how to build and guide those things, the more successful they will be. This is all about growing a universe of people who understand how to use Boomi’s unified platform just as thoroughly as humanly possible so they are successful in their businesses.
And so far our new training program is proving to have hit the mark. In just the first half of the year, we’ve more than doubled the number of certified Boomi users, proof for us that we listened to our customers and provided what they needed.
Another effort driven by our customers was the refresh of the Boomi Community. We improved the interface, enhanced the content, and built up the functionality of the forum. Customers love being able to talk to their peers, and that’s what the Boomi Community is all about.
Thanks to the improvements we made to the Community, the number of members has grown five-fold in the past year. It’s another satisfying result that shows we are continually moving forward to help our customers in any way possible.
Whether it’s our new learning program, the Boomi Community, our AI tools, updates to our product, or any of the other initiatives we undertake, we are committed to helping our customers gain full command of their data and application integration challenges.
Now there’s Boomi World, where the entire Boomi organization gets a chance to meet with our customers, learn from them, and help them become better connected businesses. I can’t wait. See you there!