Discovering Business Insights with the Board of Connectors
Accusoft is proud to be a company that develops and goes to market with mature, standards-based APIs and SDKs. One of the most compelling benefits to our structure is that our customers and partners often independently purchase, download, and extend their business-critical applications with minimal support.
However, that makes it challenging to have meaningful discussions with the people who purchase, use, and integrate our code. In an effort to better understand our clients and their use cases, we decided to host a Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) to have substantive conversations with them. The event and its members were named the Board of Connectors (BoC). During the meeting, BoC discussed:
- The specific use cases they are addressing with our SDKs and APIs
- The business challenges they are overcoming by developing innovative solutions with our tools
- What they like about Accusoft’s content processing, conversion, and automation toolkits, and what functional gaps exist based on comparable tools they’ve tested and used from the marketplace
- The value they see in our existing products and their opinions on new products in our portfolio
Pragmatic Marketing teaches us that CABs are extremely important to a company’s success, especially a company like Accusoft, which is focused on long-term customer relationships, license subscription renewals, and integrated solutions which scale.
Launching our Board of Connectors
We’ve always strived to map our product roadmaps to customer input across multiple channels. Yet to enhance these efforts, we recently launched our CAB with a select group of clients in our home city of Tampa, Florida. The event was an excellent opportunity for Accusoft executives, our Customer Relationship team, our engineering team, and our clients to have thought-provoking, engaging face-to-face discussions.
We are confident that our BoC will enable our product management team to introduce products and functionality which align with our customers’ priorities for:
- Information worker productivity and effectiveness
- Data and content security and integrity
- Application encryption for PrizmDoc Cloud
- Regulatory compliance
- Discoverability and viewability of files and text across mobile devices, computing, and browser platforms
“The BoC will create quick and long-term wins for Accusoft, and for our partner and customer ecosystem as well. It will create wins for our clients too, and ensure we develop solutions and product features which address real-world problems,” says Steve Wilson, VP of Product. “We’ll continue to enable customers to build document management functionality which complements their core applications. Finally, it will help us tailor our messaging about our products to speak to their priorities and interests.”
Long-Term Benefits for All Accusoft Customers
Even though Accusoft has been in business for over a decade, we are continually looking for new ways to align our product roadmap with our customers’ needs. Our customer relationships extend well beyond the initial purchase transaction into license renewals, training, and incremental add-ons. We designed the board to provide better networking opportunities amongst the attendees and open an ongoing dialogue that can extend far beyond the launch event.
“I came to know the people at Accusoft and got a sense of their professionalism and passion for their products and company. The event helped solidify our trust, knowing we chose the right partner who will support us during both good and more challenging times,” says Christopher Benes, VP of Software Engineering at Donnelley Financial Solutions, a member of the first BoC.
Customers outside of our founding board members undoubtedly experience common challenges that our focus group unveiled. Yet we always welcome more input from our customers and prospects. We love to create and share case studies and testimonials about how our products deliver value, and the BoC will go a long way to helping us craft compelling success stories. In addition, our clients found substantial value in the event as well.
“There were multiple benefits of this event. We had the ability to connect with the Accusoft team to understand the products, the company strategy, and the product roadmap. We gained a better relationship with Accusoft and feel we can now work together to help our clients,” reports Imran Aziz, Senior Technical Product Manager, HighQ Solutions and a member of the first BoC. “We also connected with other Accusoft clients to understand how they are using the products. We gained knowledge of when and whom to connect with in case there is an urgent requirement. Plus, we had the opportunity to explore Tampa for the first time.”
We’ve built our BoC with representation from a cross-section of the industries in our customer roster. This is to ensure our meetings, and the actions we take as a result of them, address the priorities of customers on our BoC and beyond. That includes SaaS companies that have CABs of their own. We are following best practices as we build and nurture our BoC in the months and years ahead.
Are you an Accusoft client and interested in participating in our next CAB, either to submit product feedback or learn about our product roadmap?
Contact us today!