Infrastructure has again found prominence in national and global conversations about shaping the future, a brighter future filled with opportunity. A future of smarter, sustainable, and more efficient infrastructure. The rapid digitalization of AEC is key to realizing this future. Bentley Systems has elevated customer success to a primary focus and a new senior management role to help their customers along this journey. We spoke with Bentley Systems’ Chief Success Officer and Senior Vice President, Katriona “Kat” Lord-Levins to gain insight into this new focus.
Lord-Levins: As I think about the customer success role, it helps our users be more successful. Our purpose statement for user success is to have a relentless focus on creating loyal users by assisting them in realizing their business values. It sounds like a mouthful, but it is absolutely what we will stand behind. It, of course, means that we help our users adapt and adopt our solutions and get the best value for their business. But more importantly, we need to understand their goals and how they can get ROI from working with us. We have to know who they are. We have to understand their industry, our peers, and their peers to solve those same problems. We need to understand the challenges to the industry, how they impact their business, and how they impact other companies in the industry.
What is an example of structural changes within Bentley or programs that have been put in place to support customer success?
Last year, we introduced “Voice of the Customer”; it was the first thing I did when I came to Bentley. The program has been built through the core of Bentley — genuinely listening to our users. User views and feedback have always been essential to how Bentley operates and builds solutions, but we have elevated it to a higher focus.
We do it through a series of interviews. We ask them sets of questions at every touchpoint they have; moments of truth, if you will, along their corridor. We ask them questions, we see how things are going, and we look for key themes. We also use them to influence and change things within our own company. Our focus is to bring the user into the center of Bentley.
AEC has evolved and expanded as an end-user constituency to include more people going digital in more segments of infrastructure life cycles. This means different types of customers; how is Bentley adapting?
Bentley is a unique company from the perspective that they have always put the user first. Some companies are marketing companies that do not have a long history of developing and selling software, but others — like Bentley — are very much engineering companies. It was built by engineers, for engineers, truly looking to solve problems that make sense. As our solutions evolve and expand, and with new types of users, we are listening to grow in helping them all find success.
To your point about infrastructure workflows, we care about ensuring that we can help identify barriers to adoption and removing them wherever necessary. Whether that means influencing where we can or recommending changes in their workflows, we also look at our operations and workflows. But we are not thinking only about the products — we are thinking about the workflow.
How do you and your team operate to ensure customer success to someone outside of Bentley or even outside of the AEC industry?
I use an analogy of a restaurant; like we are running a very high-class restaurant, and it has a distinct brand and a particular reputation. Our user success team, essentially, are the folks who are at the front of the house. Our customers come in, and we make them feel very welcome and settle them into the restaurant. We share menus with the food that we are serving. Our product teams are like the folks in the kitchen: the ones who are determining what gets served based on what we know about the clients that come into the restaurant. They format the menu in a certain way. We always put meat, chicken, fish, and vegetarian options on the menu. And what is the season? What is going on in the industry right now that we need to add?
In user success, we are making sure that the menu is getting to the right customers, that they are getting the right things. We follow up to make sure that everything is meeting their needs. Now, there are some things that the kitchen doesn’t do. Perhaps the kitchen doesn’t make desserts, but there is dessert on the menu, so there’s another restaurant or bakery that we get the desserts from, and they get delivered to the customer. For instance, when it comes to certain types of integration of our solutions in a large enterprise, or for a general contractor on a massive infrastructure project with numerous subcontractors, we mighty refer a customer to an AEC integration consultancy, like Digital Construction Works (DCW). [ed. In 2019, Topcon Positioning Group, a world leader in positioning instruments for survey and construction, and Bentley Systems, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for advancing infrastructure, joined forces to found Digital Construction Works and connect Cloud services for “constructioneering.”]
I use restaurant analogy all the time, with everyone internally as well. Storytelling helps people understand their role and their position. It helps our people understand how they can go back to a customer and say, “Did that meet your needs? Was it what we said it was going to be?” I mean, people write reviews on restaurants all the time. “Do you recommend us? Do we get your repeat business?” That is what we are like; that is how I’m trying to mobilize change management. Our users are going through huge change management, as are we.
How do you gauge the success of this recent customer success focus?
Metrics drive behavior, and I’m on board with OKRs — objectives and key results. People can roll their eyes at another acronym, but for us, it is a laser focus. For you to do change management, you have to zero in on the leading and lagging. What is my North Star? Where am I going to? And what is my leading indicator to make sure that we’re moving along that path? We use this structure of focus — absolute focus — to get the right help to our users to shift them along their way. Our users are very interested in what we are doing. They have asked me, “How are you doing change management?” They are looking for ways to keep pace with change themselves. They want to know what we are doing internally and what best practices we can share.
What are some common challenges facing customers who are on a change management path?
I think the real lion’s share — not all, but the lion’s share — of the pain points are trying to get people’s minds into the new way of doing things. It is all about upskilling people, training people, and giving people confidence. How do we take the paper-and-pencil person who is used to a certain way of doing things and has security and confidence in those ways and guide them to change? How do we move them into a place that could be very insecure for them to move the change?
Many of these people are sitting in positions of power to pull the trigger or not to change. The goal of a successful organization is to understand the personas. Within accounts, not only do we want to understand the user, the industry, and their peers, but we also want to understand the various mindsets, such as the managerial-level mindset and end-user mindset. Each of those individuals has a different set of requirements for how we talk to them. How do we make them feel secure? How do we make them feel confident? How do we give them the right training? How do we expose them to concrete ways that other people are doing things to mobilize them towards change?
The digitalization of AEC seems to have accelerated, yet some still seem hesitant to leap fully. What have you been doing to nudge them forward?
I think everybody has been moving toward the new way of doing things. The pandemic was this shot of adrenaline that quickly moved people. For instance, many people worked 15% in the Cloud, but then the pandemic came along and accelerated everything. For the people who dare to think about change, they have to figure out how to take the blockers away from the tools. What are the technologies? How do we guide the implementation of those?
I tell a story about when we were having conversations years ago with a large theme park company in Shanghai about moving them toward the Cloud. And they would say, “Oh, the Cloud is not safe, not secure enough.” Meanwhile, when they were doing the Shanghai tower buildings, you would see someone going through the bicycle streets with plans under their arm. They were worried about the Cloud, but they were not thinking about the safety and security of the old ways. We have to train people, upskill them, and figure out how to how to mobilize the people along the chain of digitization.
Change has to be more about the people than the tech.
People, processes, and tools. There is a tendency to forget about the people. They buy new technology and think, “This is going to solve all these problems.” They forget about the biggest component, which is the people. They think, “We’re just going to get training for those people.” Training on the picks and clicks is one thing. Training on making them feel that they will not lose their job if a new technology comes along. How do we make them feel confident with that?
It boils a little bit down to insecurity. A key to insecurity is knowledge. The more knowledge that we give them, the more confidence that they gain. We have programs that we are adding to try and train people and share concrete examples about how other people are doing it, so maybe, step by step, we can guide them along their journey.
