A leading business process software company sells a cloud platform that large enterprises use to analyze and improve operations such as procurement, accounts payable and order management. It scored the health of its customer accounts on three dimensions, adoption, value and sponsorship, and flagged accounts in red or yellow as at risk of churn. The scores showed which accounts were in trouble. They did not explain what sat behind the trouble or what would keep a customer.
In spring 2024 the company wanted candid answers from the people who own the platform inside customer organizations: the leads who run its centers of excellence and the executives who sponsor the business case. It needed to know whether customers saw a positive return and how long it took, what blocked wider adoption, how well its teams supported customers, and whether new capabilities on its roadmap would weigh on the decision to continue. Respondents could not know who sponsored the research, so that they would speak freely.
PP&A built the interview guide with the client over seven drafts between May and July 2024, starting from the client's own brief. The guide followed the client's health model. An introduction established each respondent's role, use cases and expectations. Sections on value, adoption and sponsorship probed return on investment and how customers measured it, data integration and pre-built content, enablement and operating model, and executive buy-in. A closing section asked respondents to rate five roadmap capabilities on a 1-5 scale for their influence on the decision to continue.
In early August 2024 PP&A conducted three in-depth interviews with customer decision makers: the global head of a business process improvement team who selects the tools, the head of a process improvement center of excellence three years into its deployment, and a former digital transformation director who had led two implementation rounds. PP&A cleaned the call transcripts, extracted the key points by section and consolidated them into an interview-by-interview notes workbook with closing takeaways for each account.
The client received a structured findings workbook covering three accounts in very different condition, with closing takeaways for each. For every account it recorded how long the platform took to show a return and how the customer measured it, what held back wider adoption, how scope and executive sponsorship shaped the value the customer banked, and how the customer judged support during and after implementation. It also captured each respondent's rating of the five roadmap capabilities and the product gaps they raised. Because the three accounts were in such different condition, the workbook let the client compare what separates a healthy account from one that drifts toward churn. It gave the client a customer-side explanation to set beside its account-health scores.
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