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# Customer Success
Customer Success (CS) helps our customers get value from FlowFuse. This should result in them continuing to use, make broader use of, and become advocates of FlowFuse.
# Customer Success Methodology
The basic principal of CS is to help customers succeed in their goals by getting value from our services. The assumption is, where customers get value they are likely to consciously recognise that value, be open to gaining more value, and recommending FlowFuse to potential customers. This should in turn result in customers remaining with FlowFuse for longer, delivering greater revenue, and encouraging more of their professional and personal networks to join FlowFuse.
FlowFuse has a diverse customer-base. When devising a strategy to deliver CS it is important to recognise the key cohorts within our customers. They are grouped as follows:
| Cohort | Key Traits |
|---|---|
| Trial | Not paying for services |
| Starter | Low number of Node-RED instances |
| Premium | Team of users, collaboration on applications |
| Enterprise | Large scale applications, extensive use of FlowFuse's features |
You can view our current customer-base and their cohorts in this report.
CS activity is planned to manage each of the cohorts with appropriate support & communications. The support and communications will be in some cases fully automated and in others will involve individual actions by our CS team, such as holding regular review meetings with customers.
The key goal of CS is to migrate customers from the trial status, down the table of cohorts above, and where appropriate onto being an Enterprise customer. It is however important to consider that some customers would not benefit from our broadest offerings of services. Appropriate resources should be put into customers who have found lasting value further up the cohorts table.
# Customer Success Tools
# Data Sources
To drive CS, we need to utilise data across various platforms to understand what our customers need from us to succeed. the main platforms we use are as follows:
| Platform | Key Data |
|---|---|
| FlowFuse Cloud's Database | Current usage of the platform and uptake of features |
| Stripe | Expenditure |
| Hubspot | Interaction with support and marketing content on our website and in emails |
# Useful Customer Data
- Team, User, Instances & Devices Growth
- Customer Cohorts
- Device Agent Adoption
- User Audit Interactions
# Communication
To deliver automated and manual communication with customers, we use Hubspot CRM. Hubspot allows us to collaborate as a team. This is vital when manually communicating with customers as well as operating automated email campaigns based on a customer's current cohort and interaction with their account.
We have built an integration in Node-RED which can extract data from our platforms then append it to a customer's record in Hubspot. The integration as well as any other CS resources built in Node-RED are hosted on FlowFuse Cloud and can be accessed in this application.
# Hubspot Properties
For FlowFuse Cloud customers, we add various useful data to our CRM records to help us better understand who each customer is and how they are using FlowFuse. They are as follows:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
| FFC-Tier | This links each contact on Hubspot to the tier their team is currently associated with. Where a contact is in more than one team with different tiers we will show the tier which is expected to deliver the highest ARR. You can view the current contacts by tier in this report. |
| FFC-Actions | This shows actions which have been taken by someone on a team this contact is on. To see a full list of available actions view this report in Hubspot |
| FFC-Usage | This field shows a contact's answer to how they are planning to use FlowFuse Cloud, you can view the options and current data on this report. |
| FFC-Events (deprecated) | This legacy field showed email campaigns which had been triggered to be sent to each contact. For example, after 24 hours if a user had not used out snapshots feature the integration between FlowFuse Cloud and Hubspot would add the relevant tag to this user. Hubspot would in turn send the email to the contact. This way of working is being replaced by FFC-Actions as that field can triggered email campaigns based on action or inaction as well as adding value to our CRM. |
# Inbound Support
For FlowFuse customers, there are two ways to get support, through support tickets or go to the community forum. Where to go when is described below.
| Topic | Support venue |
|---|---|
| Billing | Support ticket |
| FlowFuse Application | Support ticket |
| FlowFuse Feature Requests | FlowFuse repository |
| Node-RED Application | Community Forum |
| Node-RED flows | Community Forum |
| Custom nodes | Community Forum |
If you're not a FlowFuse customer, or in your trial phase, please go to the community forum.
# Support Tickets
# HubSpot
We use HubSpot to manage our customer support tickets for the managed FlowFuse platform. We can give each FlowFuse team member access to HubSpot by assigning them a seat.
If you wish to be granted access to HubSpot please post in the FlowFuse #support-tickets Slack channel.
Whenever a customer raises a new ticket or replies with an update a message is posted into slack #support-tickets. This will allow the whole team visibility of customer issues, comments on the Slack thread will be added to the ticket as notes.
When the customer has used the support widget you can communicate with that customer in real-time using the support-tickets Slack channel.
When replying to the ticket one should have the intent to always reply with links to FlowFuse articles or documentation. If these resources are missing, please start or update where applicable.
HubSpot uses notes and responses within the thread, notes are internal and not sent to the customer, responses are sent to the customer.
We monitor the time since a ticket on HubSpot was last updated and send alerts to slack #support-tickets where those tickets have not been updated for longer than:
- 1 day for customer created support tickets.
# Scope of Support
FlowFuse customers will only get support for issues relating to the FlowFuse application or their account & billing. Any questions around Node-RED itself or their flows should be redirected to the FlowFuse Community forum.
3rd party nodes are not supported at this time. It is reasonable to point a customer direct to a repo for a 3rd party node question.
# SLA
Support will be available between during business hours (Berlin time zones) Monday to Friday, with anything outside of those hours on a 'best effort' basis unless the customer and FlowFuse agreed otherwise.
# Escalation
Where the issue relates to a bug in the FlowFuse application then the person dealing with the ticket should aim to reproduce that bug and then raise an appropriate issue in GitHub, The issue should reference the support ticket but not mention the customer by name. Once raised the issue URL should be added to the ticket and shared with the customer for visibility. The ticket should not be closed until the bug is resolved.
# Community Forum
As the Node-RED forums are intended to be vendor neutral, FlowFuse has a community forum too.
# Scope of Support
FlowFuse customers will only get support for issues relating to the FlowFuse application or their account & billing. Any questions around Node-RED itself or their flows should be redirected to the FlowFuse Community forum.
3rd party nodes are not supported at this time. It is reasonable to point a customer direct to a repo for a 3rd party node question.