Announcing Project Orland
Most vendors/companies have their own take on customer lifecycle management, and Microsoft is no exception. The view on customer life-cycle management is as ‘a process to increase the lifetime value of your customers’. So looking beyond acquisition and renewal, to strengthening and retaining existing customers and relationships, and then growing that business by identifying opportunities for upsell and cross-sell and improving overall customer satisfaction.
Customer lifecycle management is an important consideration when you take into account the facts that sellers are 60-70% more likely to be successful selling new products/solutions to existing customers than to new ones AND it is up to 5 x less expensive to sell new products to existing customers.
60-70% greater probability of selling to existing vs new customers
5x less expensive to sell new products to existing customers
There are of course many challenges for a business when embarking on a customer lifecycle management strategy - like a high quantity of customers and not enough staff to cover them all. Often we don’t have access or the ability to pull together all of the required data and insights and without that data, how do we know who to talk to - about what - and when? With all of these things in mind … Microsoft has created a new tool for partners known as Project Orland.
Project Orland is a customer lifecycle management tool that has been built to take advantage of all of the insights that Microsoft have from customers purchasing habits around the world – it looks at your database of CSP customers and applies data models and AI to surface opportunities.
It enables you as a partner to look across your entire database of customers, pulling through the most relevant opportunities and surfacing that information in an easy to digest format.
Let’s have a look at what this tool actually looks like in action.
Project Orland is built into Partner Centre, so an interface that partners are already familiar with. Once active it sits under the Insights tile. The first screen gives an overview of the currently identified opportunities and places them into three categories – Acquire, Improve or Upgrade.
Here we have selected the Upgrade option, where it lists the customers with an identified opportunity, what the recommendations are, the propensity, seat count and product opportunity. You can click through on any customer to see the details – or you can use the filter function to narrow the list.
If you then select a customer, you’ll see details on the identified opportunity and why the data models believe the opportunity exists. It also gives recommended actions plus links out to useful resources. You can either choose to bookmark the customer if you want to follow it up – or dismiss. When you dismiss you will be asked to identify a reason for the dismissal – this is to continually increase the accuracy of the AI in the data models.
Project Orland has been in private preview for some time and is coming to public preview in October. You can register you interest in joining the public preview, here. For further information, check out the FAQ that can be found here.
