How Citrix turned its solution case studies into customer stories
Over 400,000 organizations including 99 percent of the Fortune 100 and 98 percent of the Fortune 500 use Citrix solutions to exceed the boundaries of productivity. The company is driven to facilitate the future of work.
“In Asia, the pace of mobile device use and the internet adoption is much higher than other regions, which quickly changes the way people work,” says Elaine Jung, the company’s Senior Marketing Manager for Asia. “We want to help bring the future of work into the present so that companies can help talent be productive anywhere, anytime.”
But the challenge was how to get people to connect to their brand. She knew the Citrix message had to ring with authenticity. She knew the customer evidence had to be adapted to channels prospective customers use. Elaine realized she needed to amplify the customer's voice.
Citrix gives wings to integrated customer voice
Citrix has always celebrated its customers’ success. The brand has been creating case studies for years, and it has been an effective engagement to ease the reservations new customers might have. “People might not be able to connect to the future of work messages we have. But if they hear testimonies that we’ve successfully helped others with their digital transformation, that is the best idea,” asserts Elaine.
Having worked in marketing for 15 years and seen many radical changes in best practices, Elaine knew that communication today had to do more than just talk about solutions and benefits. She understood it was crucial to get customer success across in an integrated way.
“It’s important to know how the customers feel when they use the product. It also helps to know what the user experience will be, once they make the big decision to opt for our solutions. We wanted to share that with our prospects. They can get that information through their connections, through their network, but we wanted to find a way to offer that proactively, on their social media, on their searches, during their sales engagement,” notes Elaine.
Any company looking to share their solution and product values to other customers have to understand that these stories we’re working on with Wings4U are exactly what they’re looking for!
Amplifying the voice
Elaine first engaged with Wings4U through her manager’s recommendation. “There were a lot of agencies that could help express the message we wanted. But with Wings4U, I knew they understand our brand, our guidelines. They understand design,” says Elaine. “I like the communication style of Wings4U. When they showcased their work with other accounts on customer evidence, it was very appealing. We got interested.”
She remembered the first engagement to transform the company’s messaging from technical case studies to integrated and humanized customer stories that could be leveraged on multiple communication channels. Where before, Citrix customer stories might focus on the technical solution and its benefits to business, the new customer evidence Elaine envisioned focused on the customer’s story and how that impacted the business, its culture and even end-users’ lives.
Wings4U saw the potential to influence the prospects’ journey way before they reached the Citrix website. Previously, Citrix mostly had case studies on its website. Today, apart from posting their customer stories, they are creating other assets to ensure integration and usage by other internal teams as well as to reach their potential clients. These assets include sales sliders for sales teams to use in their meetings and social media assets for marketing teams to amplify the voice of the customer.
AMPLIFICATION ASSETS
Localization also played a critical part in Citrix’s journey with Wings4U. Where necessary, customers were interviewed, content was written in a local language and assets were adapted to particular cultures. “It is helping a lot that Wings4U has representatives in the region who can actually understand the culture and help to add the local context,” Elaine adds candidly.
To top off the integrated experience, Elaine and the Wings4U team also came up with the idea of winwires - internal success story emails where an account manager talks about a recent deal closed. A single email contains a deal’s history, challenges the customer had and how the team brought the deal home. It also acts as a way to say thanks to everyone who contributed to closing the deal. The winwire is the seed for what may become a customer evidence story in three to six months after successful implementation.
“Internal communications and collaboration are very important,” says Elaine. “We are a global company. The winwire is a good chance to know the best stories of other regions. It gives us an idea about similar challenges our customers face and how we can help them. And when we share stories, we can help build our customer use cases for our own region, let other regions know what we are doing and share best practices.”
Wings4U team has good ideas and they’re also experts in the customer evidence market.
Elaine plans to develop more messaging videos and content with Wings4U. “Wings4U team has good ideas and they’re also experts in the customer evidence market,” notes Elaine. “We’ve actually already seen adoption of our customer evidence best practices in the Asia Pacific region. My colleagues in Japan and Australia have started similar activities, and both are already engaging with Wings4U! We always strive to share all the good work regionally.”
Summarizing, Elaine shares this advice: “Any company looking to share their solution and product values to other customers have to understand that these stories we’re working on with Wings4U are exactly what they’re looking for!”
OUR WORK
Customer Evidence Program for Microsoft CEE
Together with Microsoft we landed a centralized and holistic Customer Evidence Program in Central and Eastern Europe.
SES - Global Marketing Strategy
We prepared cross-regional strategy for marketing campaigns to promote and raise awareness around the entire SES video solutions.
Twitter Customer Evidence Program
With many learnings and challenges, our approach and collaboration helped to successfully establish the Twitter Chirping Program and distribute local customer stories on a more global scale.
Citrix amplification assets
How Citrix turned its solution case studies into cusstomer stories.
