Improving the consumer journey is a top business priority—Onshape shares how it’s helping its clients deliver.
Customer experience is fast becoming the key benchmark for business success. A Walker study found that at the end of 2020, customer experience (CX) overtook price and product as the primary brand differentiator. With the pandemic rapidly shifting everything from doctor visits to grocery shopping online, it’s obvious why consumers are looking for compelling experiences and why companies are working to deliver. A May 2021 SuperOffice survey of 1,920 business professionals revealed that CX is the top business priority for the next five years.
These findings come as no surprise to David Katzman, SVP of general operations for Onshape at PTC. The Boston-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) product-development platform provider renowned for its CX, was acquired by PTC in 2019. Onshape is the only product development platform that’s architected for the cloud and combines computer-aided design (CAD), built-in data management, real-time collaboration tools, and business analytics, enabling clients to seamlessly create new products fast to fuel their own CX success.
To learn more about the evolving role of customer experience, we talked to Katzman about how Onshape is innovating product development for its customers, why it pays to put people first, and the future of the industry.
What sets Onshape apart in terms of customer experience?
On a technical level, Onshape is far ahead of the industry with our platform, but it’s our culture that makes us a success.
Our platform provides a single source of truth. What used to be several layers of back-and-forth with a vendor about a problem that may or may not get fixed is now a direct communication. This lets us make changes that benefit everybody across the platform at the same time.
Our team knows that every customer is special and important to us. Everyone who works on the Onshape team has it in their job description—they have to be focused on customer success, in addition to building the most powerful technology in our industry.
How has Onshape built its innovative customer-first culture?
A customer-first culture is one in which you don’t have to tell employees what to do because it’s ingrained in the way they think. Actions speak louder than words, so all employees, no matter the department, should see managers constantly making decisions with the customer-first mentality and rewarding teams for following suit. That’s what we do on the Onshape team. What we think about every day is: How do we help our customers build great products?
Customer experience plays a bigger part of the decision-making process than ever before. On our team, we have differentiated ourselves by how we work with customers end to end. Our platform lets customers collaborate in real time so problems can be solved immediately.
Can you share more about your platform—How does your technology help companies with product development?
What you really want from a platform is to get out of the way so your engineers and teams can do their actual job: designing products to solve problems. Too often, it’s the software that slows things down. It’s a big decision, and not an easy one, to change a platform, because so much of your business and product development process is wrapped up in it. A single decision can cost days, weeks, even months per project. But what I see now is more and more people looking around saying, “You know, we’ve been on the same platform, same tool for so long, there has to be a better way. So much of the world has changed in the last 25 years. Why hasn’t our design process or tools?”
What is the most exciting trend in the product development space?
I’m excited there are more mass customization technologies, new ways of manufacturing and designing. It means a lot more things can be made at a smaller scale; enormous production runs are no longer necessary. It’s incredible watching companies embrace the new paradigm for how they can design products, both internally and externally, and with their supply chains.
Have you noticed a shift away in product design from global supply chains, either doing things more in-house?
It’s not shifting away so much as it is more diversification. When you have a super-tight supply chain, there is always risk of misalignment or miscommunication. Onshape is at the forefront of reducing the risk through our communication and collaboration technology. You can be broad instead of narrow in supply chain management because of confidence in security and real-time communication up and down the chain.
What is the future of the product development industry?
The pace, sophistication, complexity, and democratization of product development is going up dramatically. Better products are coming to market faster, which is fun, because product development hasn’t fundamentally changed since it started with paper and pencil. It’s exciting for many reasons, but the most important one is: The more people there are trying to solve real-world problems, the better off the world is at the end of the day.