Imagine you’ve just onboarded a new cybersecurity partner. After months of careful selection, a significant portion of your security budget, and a considerable investment, you’re confident that this partnership will shield your organization from the relentless and ever-evolving threats that jeopardize your environments and productivity.
You’ve been promised seamless onboarding, a tool that integrates effortlessly with your existing environment, and an intuitive platform that your teams can start using right away. You’re assured that every requirement will be met, and your new partner will be there for you, no matter what happens—they’re your partner, after all, committed to your success. But in the end, none of those promises are fulfilled. Unfortunately, this nightmare scenario is one we hear all too often.
At Aqua, we take a different approach. We build lasting trust with our customers, knowing that the cloud native landscape is constantly shifting and let’s face it cloud native security is hard. With new threats and tools emerging every day, it’s a growing challenge for organizations to stay ahead.
“Our relationships with the customer success team have helped us resolve issues quickly and build lasting trust. And in the end, trust matters the most in security.” – Sebastian Kister, AUDI AG
Empowering organizations on their cloud native journey
Navigating the complexities of customer success is crucial for fostering long-term relationships and driving growth. As organizations strive to meet the ever-evolving expectations of their customers, they encounter a range of challenges that require creative and strategic solutions. For nine years we have witnessed customers struggle with the same common obstacles such as integrating complex security solutions, adapting to rapidly changing threat landscapes, and bridging the knowledge gap around cloud security. These hurdles can slow an organization’s progress and diminish the value they derive from their digital transformation initiatives.
To help our customers overcome these challenges, we focus on enhancing their security maturity. By providing tailored support and resources, organizations are empowered to strengthen their security posture, ensuring they are better equipped to handle emerging threats and maintain robust defenses. This proactive approach not only safeguards their operations but also enables them to confidently navigate the complexities of the digital landscape.
Understanding the goals of our customers is part of our commitment to their customer success and is at the core of our company’s strategy. We believe that the success of our customer is intrinsically linked to ours, which drives us to offer comprehensive customer success services as part of our subscription model. By doing so, we create a collaborative environment and foster long-term relationships that support mutual growth.
Creating a seamless and rewarding customer success program
Proactive engagement and continuous support are essential to ensuring that our clients consistently achieve their goals. By emphasizing key elements such as personalized onboarding, data-driven insights, and regular communication, we build strong relationships that drive lasting success for our customers. This approach guarantees a seamless and rewarding experience for every customer through:
Proactive Onboarding: We streamline the onboarding process by meeting customers where they are, ensuring a smooth transition from the start. Our approach includes a maturity model assessment and joint success plans, aligning our services with their specific business outcomes. With our Compass onboarding program, customers can choose from developer or cloud security tracks to suit their team’s needs. Whether organizations are starting from scratch with Aqua or are bringing new team members up to speed, we’ve got you covered.
Continuous Education: To maintain security readiness, ongoing education is crucial. We provide a wide range of educational resources, including our Digital Success program, Compass, Aquademy, and in-depth sessions from Aqua Nautilus. These resources are integrated into our processes, ensuring customers remain informed and equipped to tackle evolving security challenges.
Digital Success: A prescriptive approach for better documentation – geared specifically to help implement and operate versus product features and function. Documented best practices that walk our customers or partners through the process to implement, configure and operate our solution.
Compass: A free enablement program geared to assist larger audiences in which our customers are provided with focused guided enablement into each of our solution modules. The program runs as a train with weekly cadence on a 6-week cycle, escorted by dedicated architects’ time.
Aquademy: Our formal enablement program where customers/partners can get trained on Aqua’s solutions and on a variety of important cloud native fundamentals. Aquademy is self-paced and allows to consume deeper education at the convenient time.
Formal ILT/VILT: Our well known and successful instructor lead training – public and private options available. Geared towards customers that want to get much more in depth enablement to select team members with the ability to drill into specific use cases.
Foresighted Support: A key pillar of our customer success strategy is anticipating and addressing customer needs before issues arise. By actively monitoring customer environments and delivering timely interventions, we minimize disruptions and ensure continuous security and operational efficiency.
Customer Feedback: We place a strong emphasis on gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback to constantly improve our services. This feedback loop allows us to better understand customer needs, refine our offerings, and provide an exceptional customer experience.
“Customer Success has been a great help, and we appreciate that it is included at no extra cost. I can always ask for time with an architect, or just have a session to go over more complicated issues.” – Vinicius Ferrier, PPRO
Making the customer journey predictable
The responsibility of guiding customers to success lies with me as the CCO and our customer success teams, along with the support, services and education teams. To do this effectively, it’s crucial to understand and discuss what success looks like for each customer, focusing on their desired outcomes, providing customers with clear product roadmaps and collaborating on building project plans. Aligning with these insights is essential when designing the customer journey.
It is equally important to clearly define the roles and responsibilities of both our team and the customer, so our customers know who to approach with requests or challenges. Throughout the entire journey, we prioritize understanding the customers, their behaviors, and their needs. By making the process more predictable, customers will quickly recognize that they can rely on our customer success team for guidance and support. This transparency is key to building trust and rapport.
How do we know it’s working? To measure success, we focus on key metrics like customer satisfaction, utilization rates, security maturity scores & value realized. Our maturity score calculator helps to assess progress and identify areas for improvement.
By tracking these metrics, we ensure our customers achieve their goals and see real results from our partnership.
Building success together with our customers
Building success together with our customers starts with building trust. We believe that sets us apart in the industry – no false promises! And it seems to be working — our customer testimonials speak for themselves.
For our existing customers, we encourage you to engage even more with our customer success team to maximize the value you receive from our services. If you’re not yet a customer, we invite you to explore how our customer success team helps us stand out in this crowded market and helps you achieve your cloud native security goals. Want to hear more, directly from our customers? Look at our customers’ page for more success stories.
