Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper, talks about the role of the Professional Services team throughout the customer journey; from pre-sales, through implementation, to go-live and support.
A discussion between Esker’s Head of Marketing, Sam Townsend (ST), and Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper (RC).
This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.
ST
Hi everyone, my name is Sam Townsend and I am Head of Marketing for Esker Northern Europe. Thanks for joining us for another Esker On Air podcast. In today’s session we are going to be speaking to Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper, to discuss the importance that Professional Services brings to an organisation such as Esker. So, at this point I would like to welcome Rob and let him introduce himself. Hi Rob, tell us a little bit about how you became involved with Professional Services and your past experience and current role.
RC
Hi! Well as Sam said my name is Rob Cooper. I have been with Esker, if you believe my LinkedIn profile, for 6 years and 11 months, to be really precise. I joined Esker all those years ago because I was looking for a new challenge and wanting to have something that was a bit more local, having worked for an Australian company previously. So, I joined the Esker Team and find myself in this position now because my boss at the time, Wynne, retired last year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to take on his role as the Professional Services Manager here at Esker UK. So, that’s how I find myself at Esker and in my current role.
ST
Excellent. Thanks for that introduction Rob. So, I guess a good place to start for those who are possibly unsure about exactly what Professional Services are or PS for short, as we like to say, and what that entails, can you explain what the services are and how they fit into the business?
RC
Sure! Professional Services is an unusual name, and does not really ring true for many businesses. They don’t really know what it is. We are there for the journey from what we call pre-sales; so before you have signed a contract to join the Esker family. We are there to help from that phase, understanding the solution, how it might fit within the business, through to installing the application, getting it integrated to your ERP, helping you through testing and integration and how that works with your business, helping you through training, testing and go-live of the project. We do not just disappear at the end of go-live because we will hand you over to the Esker Support Team for ongoing support issues. We are there for helping with those support issues if we need to be, if it’s very technical and we’re needed there. We are also there for any change requests that people may want to have. Whether that is as simple as adding a few fields onto a form or maybe it is a little more complicated, and we’re looking at creating a brand new process or we are looking at amending the workflow engines, if you are talking about the Procure-to-Pay application. We get involved in the full life cycle of the project from cradle to grave.
ST
Fantastic. Great explanation! So, now we’ve got a good overview of PS, let’s dive in a little more into the detail. Could you explain a little bit more about the onboarding process and the customer journey throughout a project implementation, and perhaps beyond?
RC
Yes. You will have probably engaged with somebody from the Professional Services team during the pre-sales process, but that is not full engagement; you are not going to hear from us all the time. Once you have agreed to join, there will be a contract in place; that is the point that the Sales Team starts to hand the project over to the PS Team and we get that notification. The first thing that you would get, is an e-mail from myself welcoming you to the project, and providing you with some documentation to go away and read. It also gives you the ability to sign up to some of the other services that we have, from Esker All Access through to Documentation and things like that. That is the first thing you would see at the start of a project. Then we start to engage with you and arrange some meetings. The first one would be a kick off call to introduce everyone to each other and make sure that we’ve understood the scope of the project, and also discuss resources and timelines for the project as well. We would love to get the project in as soon as possible, but we have to accommodate things like, well, simple things like vacations. Maybe, we have got a crucial resource on either side that has some vacation planned and that maybe changes the time line. It could be that if we are talking to an Accounts Payable team, maybe they have a month-end or year-end coming up that maybe adjust the time lines. So, those sorts of things we talk about in our kick-off meeting, to make sure everyone is happy and understands what we’re going to go away and do. This is when the project is really starting to gather pace, and then we look at getting fully engaged with the project through our integration and testing of the solution before going into training. That is really the on-boarding process of a project into the Professional Services team.
ST
Fantastic! Yes, that’s really interesting to know that! It’s great to understand how that fits into the customer journey. I presume it’s not always straightforward though and plain sailing? What kinds of challenges do you encounter with certain projects, and how are these overcome?
RC
Yes, there’s always a challenge within every project. Some of them are really big, and some of them are much smaller. We’d much prefer the smaller ones, as would our customers! Typically, the challenges that we see on the onboarding are around integration. It is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. We have seen integration take a weekend, and we have seen it take many, many months. We are here to help the customer through the process of integrating. Sometimes it is a challenge; maybe because, actually producing the files for integration is not easy for the business. Maybe they produce it and all of a sudden they start to notice that the data they’ve got is not perhaps the cleanest and they need to go away and have a mini project and clean up the data. Definitely those are the sorts of challenges that we see at the beginning of a project, and often these are the sorts of things that make timelines longer than desired. We have to go through the integration phase, because if we take an Order Management project, we need to have customer data and have material or item data to be able to process those orders. Without that we are going to struggle to process the documents, so getting that data is key. We don’t really want to progress until we’ve got that, because we are not going to be able to do things like our testing, we’re not going to be able to train you on our solution, because, we’ve got Esker data, but that is not your data. Sometimes there is a challenge there, to visualise what is going on and if it is not customers, the vendors, the items that you are expecting to see. So integration is a big, big piece of work.
ST
Right, I understand that, I guess from that point of view with the challenges, and as larger multi-national contracts are signed, you are probably going to get more challenges. Are integration partners ever used to help to facilitate the process at all?
RC
Yes. We can tackle integration partners from two points of view. It is brilliant if customers have an integration partner onboard already, and we find many customers do, because they have somebody who maybe looks after their ERP for them, and they can take on the role of integration partner. We do come across customers who don’t have that. They have had their ERP for a number of years and it has been in a happy state, so we can reach out to integration partners. We have ERP knowledge; we have as we like to call them ERP evangelists in the business, who can help and talk about a few bits and pieces, but when it comes to proper and true partners, we do have connections in the outside world who can come in and help and advise on those integration steps to make it a connected system.
ST
Ok. Perfect. That’s great. So, I guess coming on to the future, and what does that hold for the development of PS to better assist the customer through the customer journey; I guess like growing teams and that sort of thing?
RC
Yes, so the journey of PS; I go back nearly 7 years and look at what I did when I first started. I did the full pre-sales piece, joining lots of calls with potential customers to understand what they were looking for and things like that. I would go away and do the training as well, and that was great, to go out and see the customer and help them with their training and understanding of the application. And then we used to do the post project piece, where we used to help customers a lot. As the business has grown, and as PS has grown, we have identified that you can’t wear all of those different hats. It’s a big task to handle all of those. So, we now look at what we are doing. We have dedicated resources now around pre-sales. The team and the consultants do a little less pre-sales and are now focussed on the projects.
ST
So they get more time allocated to the projects.
RC
Yes. Training; we now have dedicated resources within the office around training, so that they can talk the business language, they understand how the application works, if there have been changes made they understand how they work within the project. We have dedicated resource there, which means that the consultants are doing a little less training but are more focussed on the consultancy piece. And the last part that I’ve touched on, the post project piece, we have the Customer Experience Team now as well, who are there to help people utilise the system as much as much as possible. So, once again, it is a little less on the PS Team to go away and do. That is the journey that we have been through. That is 7 years worth of journey in a couple of seconds. We have also changed the structure of the PS Team as well. So, we used to do all applications, which is great, you get to know them, and being slightly more old-school, I can go away and do all these applications. However, as the applications have matured they have become bigger, more complex and a little more difficult to understand. Trying to do all of that at the same time is a big ask of anybody. So, we now try and focus functionally on the applications so that we have people who really understand the Procure-to-Pay world and people who really understand the Order-to-Cash world as well. So, we have got people who really understand the applications and modules in far more detail than trying to spread your knowledge widely.
ST
Do you draw on resources from Esker Corporate as well. Is that something you do?
RC
Yes, we have access to what we call the International Professional Services Team – IPS. We can reach out to those guys as well, and we can reach out to the Support Team; there is no reason why we can’t do that. Through those two groups of people we can access the R&D teams as well. So, if we have an incredibly complex problem and is not easily solvable through the tools that we have available to us we can reach out to those guys as well, to get advice and guidance from them. That nicely touches on the structure of these teams as well. We have talked about consultants, and they understand how the application works. They understand how to marry these applications to the business. We have talked about change requests; we have got engineers who can, in the background, do the coding, the additional fields and things like that. They can go away and do the behind the scenes stuff to make the application more customer specific, if that is what is needed. We have changed a lot in nearly seven years, from doing everything, to being more focussed on the particular tasks that are presented to us as a team.
ST
Fantastic. That is great. Superb! Thanks for that Rob. That was a whistle stop tour of PS, but it has been fascinating, really interesting to get that insight!
RC
It is an insight that maybe many people don’t get, even internally, maybe don’t get to see, and get to understand. We aren’t the IT people who sit in darkened rooms, and don’t talk to people. We are the opposite of that, we want to be talking to people and we want to be engaging with people. It is different to, perhaps, the traditional view of IT people.
ST
Yes, absolutely. I totally agree. It shows the importance of the role that PS plays in the wider context of the business. That was fantastic, and I appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us!
RC
Not a problem. Thanks very much for having me.
This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.
This podcast and previous episodes in the series can also be found on Spotify.
