When I was looking after the Customer Relationship Survey back in 2018 there was a comment in the survey that read “Opaque roadmap”. I didn’t know what “Opaque” meant but as I host a curious spirit and am eager to learn new things (mostly the most irrelevant things if you ask my wife), I had to look it up.The dictionary read:opaque/ə(ʊ)ˈpeɪk/adjectivenot able to be seen through; not transparent.Ah! Now I got it! And that wasn’t the only person who indicated that the roadmap and general product plans from Qlik were not as transparent as one would have liked them to be back in 2018. So one of the items on our to-do list was to address that. Be more transparent and open in our communication. I know I touched on this subject in a previous blog post but now I can bring even more exciting news on the future of Qlik roadmaps, and its less than “opaque” future.But first I should call outI am really proud to be part of an organization that takes action and addresses areas of improvement. Historically my experience has taught me that change does not always come easy to some. It is often met with disbelief and sometimes a level of push back. But in the last year or so, the Voice of the Customer team has implemented and structured some really great working streams where we are looping in key people from several different parts of the company. All with one goal in mind: drive customer centricity in everything we do to improve the Customer Experience and make Qlik easier to do business with.The last six months we have started an ongoing project called “Customer Experience Initiative” (just rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it….) where we’re pulling in the top names from each organization within Qlik. We present and go through the main pillars of feedback we receive from our customers throughout all listening posts we have across the customer journey. And then we take decisive action on these. Never have I seen a group of so many senior people get together and thrive for change with such passion and stamina. I am really proud to be part of this can-do team and I’m extremely happy to be able to share with you some of the great outcomes that derive from their hard work.Secret screenshot from a Zoom meeting with some of the key stake holders in the“Customer Experience Initiative”.Opaque roadmap – a thing of the pastTo ensure we’re being more transparent with our product roadmap, we will start with hosting quarterly roadmap sessions, open for all our Customers, Partners and Luminaires. Read more and sign up for the session here. The very first one is planned for October 21st and you don’t want to miss that.Even more!We’ve seen requests for increased assistance and guidance on migrating from QlikView to Qlik Sense to focus not only on adoption but also customer experience. We’re launching new SaaS services packages to help our customers move their analytics to the cloud. In addition, we have delivered Partner enablement sessions as well as completely new Customer documents.We’re also in the middle of implementing a more visually appealing feature of our SaaS offering. I plan to share more details very soon.Partners are getting engaged!APAC is a very Partner-driven region and the initiatives we’ve seen happening there are heavily focused on an in-person “one to many” setup.In the last two months we’ve seen a huge increase in focus on addressing the adoption challenges for the region.They’ve implemented quarterly technical outreach programs to increase user awareness on a number of topics, including roadmap, new functionalities and licensing, and more. Something that will continue for the rest of 2020 at least.That’s all I had on my plate for today.This week we’re sending out the next wave of our Customer Relationship Survey. If you’re invited to take part, please provide us with your candid feedback.We read all your comments. We listen and we act!Get in touch. Feedback@qlik.com !What do you think? Let us know in the comments! ...View More

…and what better way is there than to hear from a Product Manager directly on how it's done. Here a chat with @Patric_Nordstrom, the Product Manager for Qlik Sense visualizations and GeoAnalytics. Mattias: Hello Patric, please tell us a little about yourself.Patric: I live with my family in Gothenburg, Sweden and I’ve been with Qlik since 2017. Since I started here I’ve been involved in 13 new product releases and a total of 131 new product features.Mattias: How much does customer feedback impact the product roadmap?Patric: For my own line of business I’d say it’s around a 70/30 split. 70% is from customers and 30% from inside Qlik.Mattias: Why not 100% customer feedback?Patric: Well it’s not easy to balance on the path to the optimal roadmap. Although I use customer ideas and feedback when building the roadmap, I also have to listen to our Executive team, ideas from our development team and also implement and focus on new things that keep us relevant in the business, Qlik Research is very active in bringing in new concepts. So there are several different listening posts to listen to, and several strategic decisions to take from those.Mattias: What listening posts do you and the other PMs use for collecting product feedback and new ideas?Patric: I have several discussions with customers and try my best to keep my eyes and ears open to their wishes. I know others are doing the same too.And then the increasingly important Ideas page that we have here on the community of course. The previous system was internal, so the ideas were most often registered after a Qlik Sales representative “came back“ with ideas after a customer interaction. But it wasn’t an optimal solution, so I’m extremely happy that this Community Ideas page has been set up. It is very, very valuable for all us product managers. Mattias: So how does it work? How does the ideas reach you?Patric: After a new idea has been submitted to the Ideas page on Qlik Community it’s reviewed and assigned to a product manager depending on its nature. We then have a Qlik Sense app where we can see all ideas and their status. We can see how many have visited the individual Ideas page, how many comments it has and of course the amount of likes. There are other parameters as well but I can’t tell you all of those unfortunately.All of these parameters are then weighed together to produce a score showing how sought after this new feature is, but also how much resources are needed to have it implemented in the product.We update the status of the Idea on Community as we progress in the process. So people can see exactly where we’re at with the new idea. It’s important to also read the underlying descriptions of each status.It’s then my job to add this list of desired new features to my product plan. All product managers present their “wish list” it to the management team who in turn prioritize the new features on a more holistic level. After that is done we schedule the development with our R&D team and get resources allocated to build it out.Mattias: How long does it take?Patric: It all depends on the complexity of the new feature of course. But in order to ensure we’re identifying the new product features most sought after we sometimes need several months before we can commit to a new feature. The actual development takes time of course, and we need to ensure we have a solid testing period before we release anything new so we continue to deliver a strong quality product.Mattias: Can you give us a hint of what’s coming in the next release?Patric: Releases can change up until the last few days, so it’s not 100% set in stone just yet. But I am fairly confident in one new Product feature I can hint to. I won’t say it, but you can try and “buy a vowel”.Mattias: What else would you like to tell people?Patric: Ok, this will be a feast of links, so prepare. If you haven’t already, check out the Ideas page on Qlik Community. If you’re passionate about helping us define perfection and drive the product roadmap submit your best ideas and feature requests on that page. Be active in commenting and liking the ones that are already there. With every new release I always post slides and apps on the Technical Previews page and they should definitely check out the Demo page where the team also uploads a demo app with the newest features of the latest release.Mattias: Thanks for the chat Patric, it has been really interesting.Go and vote: Use theIdeas page on Qlik Community! And should you ever get invited to a survey from us: please share your feedback there as well! We listen. We act.Have a great day!-Mattias ...View More

I know I’m preaching to the choir here but…Taking action on customer feedback in the form of implementing product, service or experience improvements is a no-brainer if you want to keep your customers happy and successful. But sometimes it can even set in motion a train of events leading to a completely new holistic approach to customer success.Qlik’s Data Literacy as Service approachIt all started when Jordan Morrow (Global Head of Data Literacy) was tasked with developing a new product agnostic program for Qlik centered around data literacy – the ability to work with, analyze and communicate with data. Data Literacy can ultimately help drive success with our products – or any BI tools.Data can be your best friend, but it’s not always “ love at first sight” and to obtain the courage to trust the data was one of the major obstacles Jordan identified. The road from “install to insight” was sometimes too long, or the data itself was overwhelming and intimidating to the point where the way forward was obscured and unclear. He took outcomes from customer interviews and combined them with learnings from other customer touchpoints, such as Qlik’s customer and partner conferences. By shining a light on the blind spots and major pain points, Jordan went to work building out our Data Literacy Program. From there was born a completely new customer success approach for Qlikcalled “Data Literacy as a Service”. In broad strokes we’re now taking on a holistic approach to drive customer success and a data-informed culture by combining a comprehensive data literacy adoption program with support services and “always-on” education and consulting services. You can get more details around this “three legged stool” here.The February 2020 ReleaseAnother Voice of the Customer fan and Qlik Community devotee is@Patric_Nordstrom, a Director in the Product Management team responsible for the visualizations for Qlik Sense and GeoAnalytics. He is extremely diligent in responding to customer feedback that we receive in our customer surveys and his team has delivered some real golden nuggets in the February 2020 release - all stemming from customer requests and feedback.To name a few Qlik Sense® Updates:Trendlines: Add new trendlines for a variety of expressions, including Average, Linear, Power, Exponential, Logarithmic, Polynomial, and more.Line chart styling: Using Picasso framework and new styling options, you can style lines for all or just per line, by varying width, style, orientation and type.Table Indicators: Choose new graphical elements, such as traffic lights, trend indicators, warnings, plus conditional icons and colors.Font: Set custom fonts inside charts, per item or all, or experiment to design the look you want to highlight key points.The Qlik NPrinting® team has listened as well and here a few Qlik NPrinting® updates:QlikEntity reports now support Qlik Sense entities, such as sheets or straight tables. Export and share Qlik Sense entities directly by connecting them to a QlikEntity report as a CSV file, without the need to create a report template.QlikView NPrinting 16 migration tool: The migration tool makes it easy to migrate to the latest version of Qlik NPrinting November. In a few simple steps, you can import connections, filters, reports, and more.Qlik NPrinting supports variable-based filters: It’s now possible to evaluate QlikView® and Qlik Sense variables. Then you can use it in a filter and set the value of the variable directly during report generation.You can also check out these two videos from@Michael_Tarallowhere he outlines the February 2020 release. He has created a longer deep dive into the release, but also a shorter version if you just want to know the basics.The Product Management team encourages you all to keep your opinions, feedback and ideas flowing! We listen, we understand and we take action.Thanks for reading!-Mattias ...View More

Hello all The Qlik Customer Relationship Survey went out in November 2019 and since then the VoC team has been working hard in making the most of your voice. We’ve read through thousands of comments. Several times. We’ve closed the loop with those that asked for a follow-up. We’ve identified main themes from your feedback and visualized it all in a beautiful Qlik Sense application (of course). And we’ve presented your voices back to Qlik’s Leadership team. To all of you that took the Customer Relationship Survey: THANK YOU! You’re helping us to shape Qlik into the company you want it to be. A VoC success story Let’s back up a bit. The 2018 Customer Relationship Survey received a lot of hype at Qlik where departments reached out to the VoC Team to learn more about how they can include the voice of the customer deeper into what they do.Especially Fabrice Dreneau, the Vice President of Customer Success Management (CSM), was a passionate fan of VoC and closely monitored all types of survey responses from CSM Accounts. He used VoC as an input channel to shape the CSM organization to what it is today. Truly maintaining the “outside-in” mindset I’ve mentioned so many times before. For example the CSMs Adam Jennings (Qlik EMEA) and Joseph Hale (Qlik Americas) have set new high standards of displaying customer centricity when working with their accounts.They put their customers’ best interest in the center of everything they do and align their customers’ business needs with Qlik’s capability to meet them. They maintain an open partnership with their accounts and continuously ask for feedback, act on it and then close the feedback-loop – a trait that has made them greatly appreciated among their customers. As an example, one of Joe's customers provide guided embedded analytics solutions. While the user experience was great, the users wanted more control to ask additional questions. Typically they would export the data and explore in Excel. By understanding that sentiment, Joe recommended Qlik's Natural Language Processing to unlock analytics for more types of users in a self-service fashion improving productivity and allowing the customer to win new business. Joe and the customer are now innovating with Qlik’s Natural Language Understanding working directly with Qlik R&D and their Qlik Customer Success Engineer. I asked Adam what mantra he works by and he said: “I am never satisfied until my customers are willing to tell other people how good we are. If they're not doing that, I have - in my eyes - not done a good enough job.” When we asked you again in the 2019 Customer Relationship Survey to tell us about your Qlik journey, customers with a CSM showed a spectacular increase in their Net Promoter Score by 19 points (!!!). Listening pays off. The story doesn’t end here We kicked off 2020 with the launch of Qlik Signature Success, which is Qlik’s personalized and prescriptive path to success with all-inclusive, always-on strategic services. Plus we launched the industry’s first Data Literacy Consulting Service to empower your organization to unleash your data potential. Two answers to customers giving us feedback on their onboarding and adoption experience and their unique challenges along the way. We continue to be in close collaboration with not only the CSMs and Product Management but all departments at Qlik to see how we can build out our feedback loops connecting you, our customers, with the heartbeat of Qlik.Keep the feedback coming, we listen and we act. All the best-Mattias Want to learn more about Qlik Signature Success and Data Literacy Consulting Service? Check outthis blog post. ...View More

We're excited to announce that today Qlik launched the industry’s first Data Literacy Consulting Service and Signature Services as part of a Data Literacy as a Service approach to creating a data-driven culture. 

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We are introducing a new role called the Customer Success Engineer (CSE) to provide our customers with proactive technical guidance along their journey.

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While the importance of a working VoC program is obvious to the majority of people I talk to, one statement I make always seems to make them think twice. I say: “Don’t ask questions in areas where you are not willing to change.” If for some reason, you’re not prepared to take the feedback and improve on the spotlighted areas, then don’t even ask to begin with. I’m sometimes met with initial silence, but everyone ultimately stands behind the statement that we don’t want to waste our customers’ time for no reason. We ask to improve We are eager to change, adopt and strive to be the best. In acknowledging that I’m not the smartest person in the room that sit on all the answers, I turn to our customers to tell me where we should improve and focus our initiatives to add even more value to their investments. We then use customer feedback to weigh in as a baseline for recommendations to the different departments within the company (Support, Product Roadmap, finance etc.). Just last month we had an opportunity to collaborate with a company called Medair for a survey regarding the Qlik Sense Business Free Trial. That meant that for each completed survey Qlik donated money to Medair, which ended up in a total of $2000 USD. Not only did we have the opportunity to help people, but we also got great insights on the Qlik Sense Business Free Trial experience at the same time. These insights helped us improve the offering to our customers. A couple of examples of improvements are: Improvements on the ease of Extending your Trial period. We bumped the inclusion of the Dropbox Connector offering (will now be live in the November release, keep an eye on the Product Innovation Blog for an upcoming announcement) Continued focus on the “Getting started” material. Launching today! Today we’re launching the Customer Relationship Survey that goes out to a large number of customers. The responses we receive from this survey helps us benchmark us against the industry and will hopefully spotlight areas where we can still improve and do better. If you’re to receive this survey I would very much urge you to provide your candid and honest feedback. I personally read all comments and there is a huge interest within all departments of Qlik to know more about what our customers say about us. An interest I can promise you goes all the way up to the very top of the company. Don’t be a stranger, come back and visit me again soon. And be sure to subscribe to the Customer Success Blog so you won’t miss a post by myself or one of my colleagues within the Customer Success organization. Thanks for reading!-Mattias ...View More

“Asking is only the beginning” A common misconception when conducting a “Voice of the Customer”-program is the notion of asking and listening to feedback, which only covers half the equation. The key to success, is to drive action and communicate what you as a vendor has done to improve the customer experience. We have adopted the below process at Qlik. Ask Ask customers to provide feedback on the desired area you want to impact. Analyze Use Qlik Sense to get the metrics to the sentiment, and review the “survey gold” (the comments, remember?) for sentiment and context. Take Action Extract areas we need to impact both short- and long term and discuss with responsible teams to develop a strategy to drive change. Track & Communicate Track the improvements and outcomes and be sure to close the feedback-loop with the public and in particular the people that provided us with the feedback. I will dive further into each of these areas in separate blog posts going forward. Let your customers define perfection Qlik has been acting on customer feedback since the inception of the company, and many of the features you see in the product today can be directly derived from customer feedback. The issue has been, at times, that we’ve been too focused on developing our products and offerings that the communication back to customers have been lacking. I have good news for you: We’re going to change that now. A few weeks back I presented on the topic “Why the Voice of the Customer should be your best friend” during an internal event here at Qlik. The mantra I tried to convey was “Let our customers define perfection” and I still notice the ripple effect, this topic was close to people’s hearts. There is a fantastic read on this topic that I think everyone should read. It tells a tale of two companies with two very different mindsets; and how they went about launching their new car models. You can find ithere. Asking is only the beginning, and soon I’ll be asking again. Our annual Customer Relationship Survey is scheduled to go live shortly. This is the most exciting time of the year for me and the team. When you receive it, please take 5-10 minutes and fill out your candid feedback. It’s my personal commitment that you that I will read each and every comment and you can trust that your feedback will be read, shown and shared across the different departments at Qlik. And then the exciting stuff happens… But more on that in another blog down the line. Be sure to Subscribe to the Customer Success Blog so you'll never miss news and updates from me and the team. Have a great day and thanks for reading!-Mattias ...View More

Hello!As this is my very first post in this Customer Success area, I’ll keep it short and sweet. My name is Mattias Malré. I live in Lund, Sweden and have been with Qlik since 2013. I am working in the Customer Success organization at Qlik as the Global Voice of the Customer Manager. In this role I am capturing your feedback and turn it into actionable items. One of my tasks is to conduct the annual Qlik Customer Relationship Survey. It goes out to thousands of people and gives us an indication of how we’re doing in areas like our products, services and our customers’ overall satisfaction with us. Furthermore the survey comments (also called the “Survey Gold” among us survey nerds) spotlight areas where we need to focus more attention to improve. “Asking is only the beginning” – This is the mantra I live (well, “work”) by. Once we get the feedback we need to react to it, inform the different departments and drive improvements to ultimately make your happier. And then also tell you about the cool things that happened thanks to your sentiment. This blog will showcase our Voice of the Customer strategy, both long and short term and how we work to manage all aspects of the feedback we receive to drive change. I will personally post new content, but I’ll also invite other colleges within the Customer Success organization to contribute to this blog space. Have a great day, it was nice to meet you. -Mattias ...View More