The end-user era
Software is an integral part of modern life. It powers our devices, connects us to everyone and everything, and has changed the way we live, work, and compete in the market. This makes it an exciting time for end-users, doesn’t it?
- Plenty of choices: Building a software company is ten times faster today than at any time in the past. In the previous decade, SaaS companies had only two competitors, while today they have nine.
- User experience: Users expect SaaS tools to be as easy to use as consumer applications. If they are unhappy with a tool, they may consider switching to a competitor.
- Flexible economics: Consumption-based and subscription-based pricing models that make it easier for customers to switch SaaS tools.
So, what does this mean for software companies? It is much harder to survive and thrive in this environment, where end-user expectations have never been higher. At DevRev, we believe that software companies must fundamentally revisit the definition of customer relationships, also known as CRM.
Customer relationship
Customer relationship is everything. It doesn’t start and end with the sales, marketing, or support teams. Your relationship with the customer spans your entire company. It’s defined by how you write code, document, build internal processes, connect tools, and most importantly, the culture of customer success across your company.
Unfortunately, this is not how customer relationship management (CRM) tools have approached customer relationships over the past two decades. The voice of the customer has been difficult to make pervasive across the company. Product teams have relied on customer support and sales to summarize customer conversations so they can prioritize their work and build products that cater to end-user needs. However, with the pace at which companies need to move in the market, the customer-to-product cycle has to be super connected and fast. CRMs that have been around for over two decades are known for being expensive, complex, and difficult to use. Why should licenses and access to departmental tools be limited to a chosen few? What if the voice of the customer were pervasive across the company?
OneCRM
We believe that every company, regardless of its size, has a simple fundamental goal: to grow efficiently. Most companies start with a tech stack consisting of GitHub, Google Suite, and Slack, as well as work management tools like Jira. As teams and specializations begin to form, they often bring in departmental tools such as HubSpot, Zendesk, and Salesforce. While these tools can be connected, the process can become frustrating, with users having to switch between multiple tools and yet encountering difficulties in answering key questions.
Data analytics teams begin to form, but often struggle to keep up with the pace of change. Dashboards quickly become stale and fail to answer the most pressing questions. This fundamentally slows down the business, making it difficult to stay competitive in the market. What if we rethought how companies and tools are architected for success?
Our vision is to eliminate limitations on data access by providing a platform that every team can use to collaborate and work, regardless of their specialization in product and software development, or customer-facing roles such as support, sales, and marketing. The platform is integrated with all your favorite apps, facilitating teamwork across all teams. Built-in analytics that combines people, product, and customer data provide key insights to address important questions and make every team more impactful. Customer support serves as a copilot to product teams, and product teams serve as a copilot to customer support teams. And with DevRev’s AI, you have your own personal copilot.
We are currently in an era where AI has greatly impacted the way we work. When data from people, products, and customers can be connected, a copilot can now autonomously do your job or act as your assistant. By combining design with artificial intelligence, you can intelligently route, classify, cluster, summarize and prioritize all work, including conversations, tickets, issues, enhancements, and opportunities, ultimately resulting in increased productivity, reduced customer churn and revenue growth.
This is OneCRM: Connected. Intelligent. Agile.
DevRev’s OneCRM platform currently powers two primary use cases: customer support and software development. It caters to customer support engineers, support managers, and product and software development teams, such as developers, engineering managers, and product managers. As we continue to evolve, the platform will expand to address more use cases and personas. We began this journey with a singular focus on powering the core transactions of your business, capturing customer feedback, their needs, and how your product addresses those needs.
DevRev Support App
For customer support teams that require real-time communication with end-users and internal teams, such as product managers and developers, DevRev’s Support app is the perfect solution. Our highly collaborative platform leverages the latest in AI, analytics, and real-time collaboration, ensuring that your team is able to deliver exception support and effortlessly retain and grow customers.
- In-app live chat with ticketing: Streamline support by integrating an in-app GPT chatbot that is pre-trained with your knowledge base into support ticketing workflows. By being in-app, you can take into account the user’s context and even think beyond just customer support. This can help you drive nudges for product announcements and adoption in the future.
- Never miss a customer SLA: Ensure confidence in all support workflows by implementing the right processes to deliver high-quality support every time. Since support and development workflows are on the same platform, SLAs are shared. Whether you connect your development issues from Jira or use our native issue tracking system, you will always be able to provide support on time. Everyone has the right context at the right time, and collaborates in real-time at the pace of the customer.
- Scale with autonomous support: Let machines handle your first line of support so that you can scale support around the clock and on any channel. DevRev can act on behalf of your support team or work as a great AI teammate. The idea is to provide your teams with the right answers at their fingertips and enable auto-routing, auto-triage, auto-clustering, auto-prioritization, auto-generation of summaries, knowledge base, release notes, and more.
DevRev Build App
For software development teams that need a fresh approach to agile development, DevRev’s Build app is truly agile for the end-user era. It enables development teams to manage sprints and issues by connecting them to customer tickets and user identity. For the first time, there is a product system that is connected to work and reflects the product hierarchy and its lifecycle, and is able to answer key questions on users, your development team, and their impact so you can best plan resourcing for the greatest impact.
- A new product system of record: While CRMs and software development tools have been around for a while, there has never been a system that fully captures a comprehensive view of a product’s capabilities and features that can unify teams and provide a shared understanding of the product. DevRev is the first system that provides a product view that is tightly connected with customer and team records.
- Customer-focused software development: Elevate the customer-centricity of your product teams by seamlessly linking issues, sprints, and enhancements with impacted customers. By aligning each development issue with customer support tickets, we can effortlessly determine work that is related to customer needs, as well as work that is inside-out and not necessarily driven by customer demand. Each engineering manager asks a common question: “How much investment is being made to maintain existing software, address tech debt, and fulfill customer feature requests?” Now, we have the ability to answer that question, including identifying impacted customers and closing the loop with them.
- An AI copilot for building better products: There are many advantages to having customer support and software development on the same platform. One powerful impact is that insights from customer interactions can automatically generate signals to help product teams identify common themes, create enhancements, prioritize them, and manage their lifecycle. This fundamentally revolutionizes the process of creating real-time connectedness between GitHub code transactions on one end and customer conversations on the other end. Now, every enhancement has a clear purpose that is connected to the customer and their business impact.
The Outcomes: Growth and Customer Success
We believe that it’s more important than ever to stay connected. We envision a world with extreme collaboration and teamwork, where analytics and AI are accessible to everyone. Each team member works towards the same goals, and everyone is invested in the company’s growth and customer success.
So, when it comes to owning growth and customer success, is there one person or department that is solely responsible? With every team member working in cohesion, it’s natural to ask, “Who really owns growth? Who really owns customer success?” The answer is clear: everyone. From the sales team to the developers, from the customer support engineers to the marketing team, every individual has a critical role to play in ensuring the company’s growth and customer success.
Through the DevRev platform, you can empower every team member to take ownership of their work and contribute to the company’s growth in their own unique way. Whether it’s through innovative product development, exceptional customer service, or effective marketing strategies, everyone now has the opportunity to play their part.
