Let's Talk Enablement. Software Enablement with Ido Bar-noam.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you work? What’s your role? And how long have you been in the Industry?

I have a technical background and started my career as an application engineer in 2011.
I understood my real passion lies in the interface between the customers and technical aspects of the product and transitioned to technical customer-facing roles like a support engineer, professional solutions, and later on leading such teams. Currently, I'm working at Cloudinary where I started as a developer support engineer and I'm now heading the Customer Success Enablement team.
The CS Enablement team works with our CS leadership to execute on CS strategy and to enable our stellar CS team members to help our customers make the most out of Cloudinary's product.

Let’s dive in, tell us how you go about driving engagement in your platform?

We have a very generous free tier to allow users to try out most of the features and see if the service fits their use case.
We also conduct proactive reach-outs to our customers based on segmentation. For our high touch customers there are designated CSM's (Customer Success Managers) that have both scheduled reach-out with their customers and reach-outs that can happen based on different usage metrics.
For mid and low-touch customers, we use a combination of automation and proactive reach outs based on their usage.

How do you think an organization can encourage a knowledge-sharing culture?

Make it easy to do so. Knowledge should be easy to access and on-demand as much as possible. So if team members are looking to do something, ideally they would find how to do it directly from any system they currently work in.
For example, a team member should be able to have access to data from the organization's CMS from a quick Slack search.

What are the top 3 things that you would like to see being impacted by a software enablement methodology/platform?

‍Engagement - Engagement is an indicator of value, so the engagement with the service/tool should increase by enabling users to do more with the service/tool.
Satisfaction - Enabling a service/tool should make it easier and more enjoyable to use it. So I would expect an increase in satisfaction when measuring it. This can be done by an internal NPS, or even a simple internal survey of the users.
TTV - Time To Value may differ based on what is being enabled, but regardless, I would expect the time to reach the goal reduced. Whether it's faster onboarding of a new customer/employee or finding an answer faster.

What measurements and KPIs do you use today to define your Platform Engagement goals?

There are a lot of aspects that can be measured to note engagement. Some of them, like the number of submitted tickets, or event participation, may be weak indicators, but if you combine a lot of weak indicators, you can get an accurate picture of how engaged your customer is. Here are a few that we use:
Usage - The most verbose metric to measure engagement with. The more your customers use the service/tool the more they are engaged.
The number of use-cases used - We monitor and measure the number of different use-cases a customer use based on their plan. We can then say whether there is an increase or decrease in usage based on the change in the number of use cases.
Email responsivity - We track the responsiveness of our high-touch customers based on Email communication. This is a weak indicator by itself but combined with other measurements, it complements the picture.

Personal Question to close the talk. Since we know sharing the Knowhow is a team effort and we are big sports fans. What is your most memorable team sports moment?

Around 2006 I flew to Barcelona to watch the local soccer team play. Back then the main attack squad of the team consisted of 3 amazing players: Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, and a youngster named Messi. This was also my first time in Camp Nou, Barca’s home stadium, and the largest in Europe. The game itself was a great experience which ended 3:1 to Barca. There is no particular moment that stands out but the entire experience left a mark. Being part of the crowd when Barca scored, and seeing those superstars play together, is something I remember to this day.

If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way to do it? Social/Email etc?

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Feel free to reach out at ido.barnoam@cloudinary.com or on Linkedin.

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