VistaXM Is Powering A Customer Experience Partner Revolution

‘The partners who adopt this are going to step ahead of everybody and become the dominant players,’ says VistaXM founder and CEO Erik Vogel.

Deanna Davenport, vice president of customer experience at CRN Solution Provider 500 powerhouse ePlus, said VistaXM has made all the difference in raising the bar on the ePlus customer experience.

“It’s a very high-touch service model they deliver for us,” said Davenport about the VistaXM customer experience as-a-service offering. “So we just feed them the data and they build and deliver everything and do the complete data analysis and readout.”

ePlus, No. 30 on the CRN 2025 Solution Provider 500, is one of a growing number of solution providers and vendors implementing the VistaXM customer experience revenue-generation offering.

The VistaXM customer experience revenue intelligence as-a- service offering is aimed at proactively identifying customer concerns or issues and then taking specific actions to drive sales growth in a land-and-expand IT services market.

“Part of the value of having a CX organization is being able to elevate the voice of the customer to tell us how we are doing,” said Davenport. “VistaXM’s business-agnostic customer success experience is priceless. It really helps us broaden our horizons from a CX perspective.”

In the case of ePlus, the VistaXM service is at the center of a Net Promoter Score survey with a focus on ensuring the questions are asked in such a way that “it is meaningful and can be translated into a business transformation conversation where needed,” said Davenport.

“The value of partnering with VistaXM is they bring an agnostic viewpoint into the data that we are gathering from the survey and they are helping us break down the results to highlight where we are doing well and where we need to make some adjustments in our business,” Davenport said. “If we’re asking our customers to take time out of their day to tell us how we are doing and complete a survey, we want it to be worth their time and mean something. Having that unbiased filter and the results come from the VistaXM team with the readout to our executive team and business leaders is critical to our mission.”

Driving Customer Retention With VistaXM’s Help

The ePlus customer experience team with VistaXM’s help is driving customer retention and deeper and more strategic engagements with customers, said Davenport. “You can’t move from transactional business to strategic business unless you are making the investment in CX,” she said. “It’s not enough anymore to make sure the box is plugged in with blinking lights. We have to make sure what is happening behind those blinking lights is what our customers need to run their business.”

Erik Vogel (pictured), founder and CEO of Salt Lake City-based VistaXM, said the midmarket-focused company with a strong channel heritage is going beyond the traditional benefits of customer experience by providing what amounts to a “revenue intelligence platform” aimed at generating revenue growth for partners and their OEMs.

VistaXM is providing the ability to go deeper than traditional customer experience platforms by going well beyond the Net Promoter Score questions to a focus on the sales process, the procurement process, the on-boarding process and then the renewal process, said Vogel.

“We look at each stage of the customer journey and also customer persona so we are talking to the executive decision- maker, the buyer, the procurement teams, the architects and engineers who are designing the solution and the day-to-day users who interact with that system or solution,” said Vogel, a 26- year IT services veteran with experience at channel stalwarts HPE and Cisco Systems. “When you start getting customer feedback across that customer matrix, the intersection of those points allows us to provide true revenue guidance and revenue intelligence.”

That revenue intelligence focus opens the door for VistaXM, for example, to see where a vendor or partner might have significant renewal risk because of “high operational friction” in a specific region, said Vogel. “That is a very different actionable statement that we can now tell a partner versus just telling a partner that your NPS [Net Promoter Score] dropped five points,” he said.

An ‘Absolutely Massive’ Return On Investment

The VistaXM return on investment is “absolutely massive” given the ability to identify problems where partners or vendors are at risk because of unforeseen problems in the field, said Vogel. “It’s amazing for a relatively small investment the top-line impact this could have on a channel player,” he said.

One of the benefits of VistaXM is its ability to act as a trusted, consistent and standardized customer experience platform for vendors and partners sitting between those parties and the customers with a guarantee not to share specific customer names. “We’re using CX methods, science and technologies and applying it in a way that is purpose-built for the channel to solve the data trust problem so it benefits both the OEM and the partner,” said Vogel.

Bruce Coughlin, former CEO of service provider Cloud Technology Partners who joined VistaXM earlier this year as chief growth officer, said the company’s “secret sauce” is its customer experience expertise. “We’re providing partners a major lever to understand the wants, needs and sentiments of their customers and in the case of the OEMs we are doing this consistently across the partner base to establish benchmarks that are meaningful and statistically relevant. It’s pretty exciting.”

Coughlin said the VistaXM platform provides an “early warning” system to address a customer concern or issue and also provides a way to help expand business with customers into new areas. “We look at how partners can move beyond selling two or three things to five things,” he said.

Coughlin, who helped drive a customer cloud service focus that resulted in Cloud Technology Partners being sold to HPE in 2017, said customer experience is becoming more important for partners to differentiate themselves in a trust-based services- driven market. “The more progressive partners are thinking through how they can create differentiation and sustain it with customer experience,” he said. “That is a fundamental tenet of what is going on in the channel.”

Vogel, for his part, said the message for partners and vendors is to get on board with the revenue intelligence revolution by teaming with VistaXM.

“If you want to know where revenue is being won or lost, where in the journey it is breaking down, which personas don’t value you or overvalue you—if you really want to start taking action to improve your business, we’re the answer,” he said. “We’re all about improving revenue, retention and expansion. That’s what we deliver at the end of the day. We use a model that nobody else uses today in the industry. We pioneered it. We have a true revenue intelligence platform.”

Pulling Away From The Pack

Vogel said he sees the partners embracing the customer experience revenue-generation model in a services-driven IT era pulling away from the pack. “The partners who adopt this are going to step ahead of everybody and become the dominant players,” he said. “The ones that keep the old ‘beat ’em by a point’ mentality are the ones who are going to struggle.”

Davenport, for her part, said she is “excited to continue” the customer experience journey with VistaXM. “They are going to be a huge part of our CX strategy going forward,” she said. “We are looking at everything from our customer experience journeys to our digital experience with our customers. You will continue to see us look at how we engage customers differently across a broader area of our business. CX is a team sport. Yes, we do have a dedicated CX organization, but it should permeate across all areas of our business: presales, sales, project management. You will continue to see us put more and more focus on CX across a broader part of our business.”