Mural has integrated its Facilitated Adoption customer experience platform with Parallels
Customer experience for cloud and managed services provider Mural announced at Parallels Summit 2013 this week that its Facilitated Adoption platform is now available in the APS ecosystem.
Facilitated Adoption helps reduce customer churn and ongoing support costs, while increasing activation. The solution helps bridge the gap between customers ordering cloud services, and then abandoning it shortly after the sale because they don’t understand how to use the new services effectively.
Facilitated Adoption is also a way for service providers to differentiate their offerings with onboarding and post-sales support services. Mural currently supports hosted email, cloud storage, virtual servers and cloud security, and its services are available as licensed platforms or managed.
“After the sale is a very critical period,” Steve Zimba, CEO of Mural tells the WHIR in an interview. “What we’ve found is a lot of the sales never get fully activated at all. Our primary service and platform we have addresses that issue.”
Facilitated Adoption’s integration with Parallels, customers can schedule an appointment directly through Parallels Plesk with a Mural-trained Activation Engineer. They work with customers to assess their needs, suggest solutions and set up tools live via remote support software.
“Now with our APS package it makes it easy for a cloud provider that wants to work with us and our service, they can just grab the APS package and quickly get it up and running with our service,” Zimba says.
Many cloud providers do not offer an onboarding service, but some do, including Infinitely Virtual who launched a free service to help customers navigate the migration process of moving to cloud hosting.
“Facilitated Adoption solves a major obstacle for cloud and managed IT providers: unrealized revenue from services that are never activated,” John Zanni, vice president, service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels said in a statement. “Mural is the first company to offer this type of support service via APS, and we are thrilled to include them in the APS ecosystem.”
Mural is based in Tucson, Arizona, and has a business presence throughout the US and Latin America. Zimbra says it is looking to expand further in Canada, Europe and Asia in the coming year. Its integration with Parallels will help it scale internationally.
Talk back: How do you help onboard customers to cloud? Would you consider using a service like Mural’s Facilitated Adoption, particularly since it launched its APS package? Let us know in a comment.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
