Case Study: Implementation and Success Marlene Lee Summers, Sr. Director Global Support @ Zuora Veteran Customer Success professionals know all too well that when the customer has a poor implementation experience, things can get problematic very quickly and have long-term consequences to your relationship. A year ago, Zuora launched Z-GRAB, Zuora Go-Live Review Assessment Board, and have dramatically reduced the incidence of launch disasters, significantly improving the transition from Services to Customer Success.

1. Case Study: Implementation and Success Marlene Lee Summers Page 1 of 2
Customer SuccessCon West 2016
Case Study: Implementation and Success
Marlene Lee Summers, Sr. Director Global Support @ Zuora
Veteran Customer Success professionals know all too well that when the
customer has a poor implementation experience, things can get problematic very
quickly and have long-term consequences to your relationship. A year ago, Zuora
launched Z-GRAB, Zuora Go-Live Review Assessment Board, and have dramatically
reduced the incidence of launch disasters, significantly improving the transition from
Services to Customer Success.
Context
o Back in 2013, on Zuora’s path to 100M, we were faced with large enterprise
customers with complex, multi-faceted implementations.
o We needed a cross-functional mechanism to ensure that customer
implementations are operational healthy and ready for production go-live.
o We had to prevent customer launch crises and improve transition and
knowledge transfer to operational teams (Support, CSM, Ops).
Our Call to Action
o Zuora Go-Live Review Assessment Board (Z-GRAB)
o Cross-functional committee comprised of leaders of global services, support,
customer success managers, engineering and technical operations with
executive support.
o Facilitate healthy customer implementations through go-live review and
certification.
o Funnel lessons learned and best practices for solution design and operational
readiness back into the global services and engineering organizations to
improve future implementations and our products.
Approach
1. Identify the problem & symptoms
§ Incidents, escalations, resources, customer sentiment, churn
2. Describe possible causes
§ Design, performance, process, training, personnel, operations
3. Brainstorm the options
§ Problem scope, stakeholders
4. Propose a solution
§ Build consensus, methodology, executive buy-in, evangelists
5. Evaluate & Iterate
§ Methods, obstacles, metrics (V2MOM framework)

2. Case Study: Implementation and Success Marlene Lee Summers Page 2 of 2
Program Components
o Standing committee: leader, customer success executive, global services
regional executives, customer success architect, engineering leaders, senior
application support engineer, support operations manager
o Participating parties per implementation: engagement manager,
regional practice director, solution architect, solution consultant, customer
success manager
o Candidate identification: implementation go-live report, scheduling
o Communications: distribution list, slack channel, confluence site,
salesforce implementation record, offsite training
o Decks: program overview, engagement manager template, training
o Testing environments: functional, integration, acceptance, performance
o Technical reports: standard set based on review of historical application
incidents and escalations, accessing operational health of implementation
§ Daily numbers and execution times (average, 90% and max)
• UI Requests, API, jobs, errors
§ Session and caching management
§ Synchronous transaction timeouts
§ Concurrency limits, rate limits
§ Slow UI requests
§ Internal application errors
§ Top 100 customer facing errors
§ Top 100 duplicate ZOQL requests
o Review Meeting: presenters, flow, delivery
o Approval outcome: green, yellow, red
o Exception handling: resource availability, scheduling, external pressure
Lessons Learned
o Foster internal buy-in and customer awareness
o Program development timing – from the start vs. waiting for issues
o Technical review assessment and meeting timing
o Program scalability
o Adoption – the new norm
Marlene Lee Summers ◦ marlene@zuora.com ◦ linkedin.com/in/marlene ◦ www.zuora.com