We aim to support our Sales teams across the company, but we have many stakeholders. We work very closely with Sales, of course, to make sure they get the right references to fit their prospects and to support upsell with our existing customer base.Our Marketing teams are also stakeholders; we help provide those customer proof points for marketing campaigns, a customer saying ‘This is how it works; these are the benefits we’re experiencing’ is key. We want to lead with the voice of the customer, and we really want to put our customers at the center of what we do, to be even more customer centric as an organization. Our customers take part in CABs and our team works with product marketing and product management to make sure we have engaged customer representation in these focus groups. We have numerous CABs in different countries, for different products which our team helps coordinate.In partnership with our events and creative team, we look to showcase customers in an event space using print or video. Our team supports customer outreach. Working closely with account owners we can gain insights into how our customers are innovating and leading the way with technology. We want to share their successes in our Customer Success Stories. We also work with our PR and Media team, and our Social Media team, on how we can amplify our customers successes, finding customers who are doing innovative and interesting things using our technology. If they're doing great things on sustainability, for example, let's showcase them; let's highlight them because their peers can learn from them. Our team liaises with many diverse groups within Epicor.

There was a desire to move away from the Sales team having spreadsheets; to make sure we have a centralized global pool of references, so everybody benefits. We serve many industries, and being able to speak with a customer who is in a very similar industry to you, as a prospect, is hugely beneficial. They can discuss the industry challenges and how technology can help ease or eliminate those pain points. We needed the breadth of customer references and the ability to easily share visibility of them.Change management; changing the mindsets people in the organization to see the value of what we do and why we do it; can be difficult. We've implemented user rewards in ReferenceEdge so we can look to reward our engaged sales team members. Weighted points are allocated for different reference activities. We also internally keep track of customer points based on how they've advocated for us. I think it's been positive for people to see that we are tracking it; we are measuring it, and we do care passionately about it.The customer appreciation aspect of our program has gone a long way to support change management at Epicor. Our account owners, who look after our customers, don't want their customers to be overused and want them to feel valued and nurtured by Epicor. We know our customers are busy with day jobs and ReferenceEdge helps us see which customers have already been approached and supported advocacy activities.We carried out a gap analysis in our customer references and have run reference prospector campaigns to try and proactively fill those regional and industry reference gaps. We have improved reporting and can now get granular reporting on the influenced revenue from a specific contact at a customer account. There is real value in this data visibility, as we build out our VIP experiences for our customer advocates.

We send a quarterly email to our teams reminding them to record their references before we execute our customer appreciation sends.We're trying to instill rigor in reference use recording and trying to track influenced revenue from our customer references. We've made good progress but there is still room for improvement in ReferenceEdge user adoption.We are taking our reference data to the next level, enhancing it using reference attributes so we can find customers who utilize add-on modules to help find better reference fits. Finding references has certainly been simplified using the attribute tagging in ReferenceEdge to include that ‘use case’ information.

Our Sales teams are a little more confident taking a self-serve approach to reference finding. We typically receive the more complex requests now as opposed to receiving all of the reference requests. As a result of making ReferenceEdge more self-serve, our team has greater capacity to progress customer engagement and customer storytelling.We've made some positive strides with data. We have a clear annually refreshed roadmap for ReferenceEdge. We break the roadmap initiatives into quarterly bite-size chunks, and then we focus on executing the planned activities. Through the dashboards we’ve developed, we can track KPIs with greater ease for the program and by measuring and reviewing data, it helps maintains team focus and drive.

The configurable attributes are fantastic. We can start building out use cases and tag accounts with module referenceability. Having that flexibility to configure ReferenceEdge ourselves without having to raise an enhancement request is beneficial. The dashboard visuals that can be developed within ReferenceEdge are great. We have a rewards dashboard that we've built for the sales team so they can look at how many points they've accumulated and how many points their customers have accumulated for advocacy activities.We have quarterly internal KPIs related to tagging customers with add-on module referenceability, customers that are referenceable for the cloud, new customers who have added products to their portfolio, and influenced revenue targets. We've become more metric driven as a team in the past few years.

We look at the many touchpoints we've had with customers because it's a holistic program. We try to record all of those touchpoints in ReferenceEdge, so we can run a report showing all of the advocacy activities our customers have supported. We look at influenced revenue; we look at tool adoption; we look at total referenceable customers as a percentage of our overall customer base. We look at module references and cloud references and how we're moving the dial on those. How many stories we've written, how much our stories are utilized. We look at story and our content views and shares, so we can ascertain how engaging the content we are creating is to our audiences and to the internal Epicor teams.We also measure success through our customer relationships. Our customers do a lot for us and partner closely with Epicor. Over time we’ve built strong relationships with many of our customers. Our customers support us at events and at Epicor conferences as event speakers, they participate in PR and Media opportunities, they speak with Analysts etc.

Our Point of Reference Account Director has been an amazing partner. She's very responsive, very attentive, very supportive. She meets with me weekly; we look at the ReferenceEdge roadmap, we brainstorm ideas and discuss new business needs and how ReferenceEdge could be adapted and configured to meet them. Our Point of Reference Account Director has been a fantastic partner, she’s very hands-on and she takes great ownership, helping us troubleshoot when needed.