Want to Maximise Success From Your Atlassian Apps? Meet your Customer Success Manager!

[Hana Packford]

How many of you have an email from your Atlassian app vendor's Customer Success team sitting in your inbox? And how many of you are ignoring it each day?

It's one of the best kept secrets that talking to your Customer Success Manager really helps maximise long-term success, but so few users take us up on the offer! Believe me, when they do, they're converted and never miss a success review.

I'm Hana, the Customer Success Manager at AppFox. Over the past year, I've had a lot of conversations with the teams who use our Atlassian apps. A few patterns have come up time and again, and I think they're worth sharing.

The ‘iceberg problem’

Most Atlassian Marketplace apps (ours included) were primarily designed to solve a single, well-scoped problem. That visible part is what most customers ever see, and like a real iceberg, the bulk of the value sits underneath

You install an approvals app to bring structure and visibility to your page sign-off process. You install an optimisation app to get on top of a sprawling Jira instance, and keep it running smoothly as it grows. You install a compliance app to make sure your sensitive content is classified and properly governed. Job done.

But almost every long standing Marketplace app has far more under the surface than its headline use cases. Macros, dashboards, automations, integrations, admin tools have steadily been added release after release, and unless someone tells you about them, you tend not to notice.

So you carry on solving the original problem the original way you set it up. Sometimes for years. That is exactly the gap a CSM is there to fill.

More teams, more use cases.

The other pattern I see constantly is siloed adoption.

An app gets bought because one team had a problem. The licence covers the whole instance. And then, only that team ever uses it.

I've seen apps spread organically across finance, product and engineering once we map out the use cases together. I've equally had calls where the person who owns the licence has not opened the app, because the admins running it day-to-day sit in a different team altogether. A customer success conversation is often the first time those two groups have a chance to connect and collaborate.

And it isn't only about reaching other teams. Often the team that already uses the app is only applying it to one specific use case, when those same features could be solving several other problems for them in parallel. An approvals tool installed for documentation sign-off can just as easily handle policy reviews, vendor onboarding or compliance attestations. A conversation with your CSM often surfaces those parallel possibilities.

If you are paying for an instance-wide licence, a wider view of who else could use it (and what else it could be used for) can suddenly provide new value.

Why Atlassian apps specifically?

A few reasons:

• They tend to be quietly over achieving. They enhance Jira or Confluence rather than sitting front and centre, so it is easy for features to go unnoticed.
• They are cross-functional by design. Confluence and Jira touch almost every team in your business. With Atlassian's new Teamwork Graph connecting data across apps, and Rovo using it to surface insights in context, that reach is only growing. This means all of the apps you have installed in your instance have the power to reach more potential audiences than the team that originally bought it.
• The whole ecosystem is going through a time of transition (from Data Center to Cloud and from Connect to Forge), so apps are evolving fast. What your team knew about your app two years ago is probably already out of date.

That is why the Customer Success offering matters. At AppFox, we run Success Reviews: our take on the traditional Quarterly Business Review, shaped around what each customer actually wants from our apps rather than a generic ‘check-in’.

We also run customer success workshops and tailored training sessions, all built around enablement and adoption. Many other Marketplace vendors offer something similar, and it's almost always already bundled into what you're paying.

Don't let that email sit there!

If there is an email sitting in your inbox right now from your Atlassian app vendor's customer success team, offering you a review, a workshop or some newsletter tips, why not make the most of it and hit reply?

It is likely that you will walk away with a list of features you didn't know about, a wider understanding of use cases and more of your teams who could benefit from them, and a direct line to the people building the product.

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AppFox builds apps to standardize and optimize compliance and collaboration in your Atlassian stack. Automate your workflows, with built-in audit, clean-up and approval controls across the Teamwork Collection.

Approvals for Confluence // Fast, flexible approvals for your pages

Workflows for Confluence // Automate every step of your document lifecycle

Compliance for Confluence // Page classification and risk detection controls

Optimizer for Jira // Jira clean up, maintenance and long-term governance tools