How Skyflow automated their customer life cycle

How do you automate customer processes that can’t be fully automated?

When it comes to customer experience, Skyflow believes in getting a process right before adopting a new tool to optimize it. So when Ari Hoffman, Skyflow’s Head of Customer Experience, started looking for ways to automate his team’s processes, he wanted a tool that would streamline their workflows, not require them to change the way they work.

Ari wanted to automate the routine actions they did for every new customer—but they also had many interactions that couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be left to automation. These were manual steps like making intentional decisions about assigning the best Program Manager for each customer, customizing Sales-to-CX handover details, and personalizing renewal conversations. Skyflow values the personal touch they bring to customer interactions; sounding like a robot in automated communications wasn’t an option.

It was also critical that any new tool would allow them to keep working in the software they already used, and not force a data migration. Ari had no intention of asking other departments to change their day-to-day behaviors; that was unrealistic for a 100+ person company with sizable Engineering and Sales teams like Skyflow.

After evaluating both vertical customer success tools and automation platforms, Ari came across exactly what he needed in Relay.app.

“You need to be able to personalize these steps so things don’t feel robotic. One of the things we value at Skyflow is the personal touch. We want all our customers to feel that they are getting a personal touch, and Relay.app allows this.”

Ari Hoffman, Head of Customer Experience at Skyflow

Automating workflows with a human in the loop wasn’t possible with any other automation tool

It started with a few simple playbooks, but over the course of a year, Skyflow brought automation to every phase of the customer lifecycle. Soon they had playbooks running across pre-sales, sales, onboarding, QBRs, and renewals with Relay.app.

“We have Relay.app throughout the entire customer lifecycle. From before they are a customer, to sales, to onboarding, to go-live, to QBRs, to renewal. Every part of the life cycle is built around Relay.app.”

Ari Hoffman, Head of Customer Experience at Skyflow

One of the most valuable flows that Skyflow automated was customer onboarding. Ari evaluated industry-specific tools, but they would require a data migration and force some teams to change the tools they worked out of. Relay.app connected the tools the teams were already using and allowed them to stay focused where they needed to be, like Salesforce and Jira. Well-crafted updates sent over Slack meant that most of the team never even needed to open Relay.app’s interface; they stayed informed without learning a new tool.

In crafting their playbooks, Ari and his team kept some steps intentionally manual. Decisions like assigning the best point of contact for a customer, or sending check-in emails, could have been fully automated, but they saw the value relying on a human in the loop.

Rather than leaving everything to an automated system, with Relay.app they were able to keep the flexibility to make educated decisions, add personal touches to communications, and intervene in the flow when it would increase the value for the customer.

“The highest value workflows need a human in the loop. Relay.app is meaningfully increasing awareness of opportunities, improving renewals, saving me time, and decreasing deal cycle times because there is a human in the loop.”

Sam Sternberg, Global Head of Solutions Engineering at Skyflow

With Relay.app, Skyflow reduced time from contract signed to hands-on-keyboard by 80%

When it came to customer onboarding, Ari’s top line metric for the CX team was to reduce the time from a customer signing their contract to being “hands-on-keyboard ready” to use the product. By automating their process with Relay.app, they were able to reduce this time by a striking 80%.

“How quickly can we get hands on keyboard is the topline metric. We reduced that time by 80%.”

Ari Hoffman, Head of Customer Experience at Skyflow

Automation brought other benefits as well. Sam Sternberg, the Global Head of Solutions Engineering, built dozens of playbooks for the CX and Sales teams that have a positive impact across the company, even for individuals who have never logged into Relay.app:

• Slack alerts about customer stage changes in Salesforce significantly increase transparency, make interventions easier, and create unexpected opportunities for connection.
• Standardized QBR processes mean that every customer gets a consistent deck every quarter—and the product team can easily update a single source of truth.
• Customer support playbooks with paths allow for providing different levels of support to customers, minimizing the overhead of the support team.
• Well-timed renewal communications mean that CX managers don’t need to track when they need to reach out to their customers to begin conversations.

Additionally, by automating low value activities and focusing on those that enhance customer value, Ari has been able to better optimize how his team works (and save money by deferring hiring).

As Skyflow continues to grow, the CX and Sales teams will continue scaling their customer processes, with the goal of making them more efficient through automation without reducing valuable interactions. For Skyflow, it’s important to be as close as possible to their customers, and they don’t want to lose that by automating away the human steps that add value. Relay.app makes this possible.

“We had a customer sign up over the weekend and they were ready to go by Monday morning. That for me is the power of Relay.app. We don’t lose momentum.”

Ari Hoffman, Head of Customer Experience at Skyflow