About BeyondTrust
BeyondTrust is a global identity security company that helps organizations manage their identity attack surface, secure privileged access, and protect against identity-based threats. More than 20,000 customers use BeyondTrust, including 75 of the Fortune 100.
TL;DR
Customers receive tailored onboarding plans based on the BeyondTrust products and use cases they're deploying.
BeyondTrust uses GUIDEcx's API to automate project creation, connect customer data across systems, and trigger targeted adoption plans.
Targeted adoption plans helped one customer configure four connectors in two days and another reach 100% license deployment.
The challenge: Giving every BeyondTrust customer clear paths to value
BeyondTrust provides a broad portfolio of cybersecurity products, each with its own use cases, configuration requirements, and paths to value. Customers also have access to a wide range of resources, including BeyondTrust University, product documentation, the BeeKeepers customer community, support, and other enablement content.
While that breadth gave customers a lot to work with, it presented a challenge for BeyondTrust to provide tailored adoption journeys for each product for customers to navigate. BeyondTrust needed a better way to show each customer what to do first, what to do next, and which resources mattered for the specific products and use cases they were trying to deploy.
Put simply, BeyondTrust needed a solution to create a clearer sequence for moving customers from purchase to configuration to active use and value.
“Because there is a lot of available content across our University and other sources, it can be a challenge for a new customer to know which place to go first.”
When customers were unsure where to go, they often turned to support or their account team for help, even though in many cases, they didn’t have a technical problem. They simply needed clearer guidance on the next step or the right resource.
Ultimately, this disconnect increased the time it took for customers to see value from BeyondTrust, particularly if they ended up in the wrong spot for information without the ability to self-serve it.
Prior to GUIDEcx, BeyondTrust was managing onboarding with a combination of a PSA platform for customers who paid for professional services, Gainsight to identify adoption signals, and email for primary communication with customers.
To round out their stack and enable their customers to see value faster, the team opted for GUIDEcx to bring those signals, resources, and implementation steps together into more curated customer journeys across their product lines.
Why BeyondTrust chose GUIDEcx over competitors
BeyondTrust evaluated another onboarding software alongside GUIDEcx. During their evaluation, they saw an important difference in how the two platforms let customers engage with their onboarding plans.
The competitor requires customers to complete onboarding tasks through their portal during onboarding. GUIDEcx instead gives customers multiple ways to participate without requiring them to continually return to a separate portal. For example, customers can receive tasks and updates through email and respond directly with "I'm stuck," "I need more time," or "I'm done,” an important capability that matches how BeyondTrust sees customers actually work.
Devin Churchill, VP of Customer Success & Adoption at BeyondTrust, highlighted that limitation in the competitor’s platform, saying that getting customers to go to a different tool to follow steps and then interact with those steps was challenging.
A customer might receive a set of implementation steps, follow them in the BeyondTrust product, and never return to the GUIDEcx portal to formally mark each task complete. BeyondTrust still wants that customer to have the guidance they need.
“Giving the customer more options to understand the tasks that they're on was really important because I didn’t want to get stuck in one specific lane where customers aren’t going to the portal, but they still get what they need through the email notifications.”
GUIDEcx’s API also played a major role in the decision. BeyondTrust wanted to connect onboarding to its broader customer technology stack and build its own workflows, applications, and reporting around the data.
For Devin, that capability was a requirement:
“Everything we do is API-driven. So if we can’t do it with an API in the product, you wouldn’t have been chosen.”
GUIDEcx gave BeyondTrust both pieces: a flexible experience for the customer and an API foundation that let the internal team build around its own operating model.
The solution: Building onboarding around what each customer wants to accomplish with the GUIDEcx API
BeyondTrust uses GUIDEcx to build a curated adoption journey for each of their unique products and use cases, including some project plans covering multiple use cases. Customers start by completing a survey that identifies those priorities. BeyondTrust uses AI, automations, and GUIDEcx’s API to translate the responses into a bespoke adoption plan specific to the customers use cases and priorities.
The plans can look very different from one customer to the next. Devin pointed to one project with 60 tasks, another with 95, and a more complex project with 171 tasks covering 19 of 21 available use cases across two products. The difference reflects the reality of BeyondTrust’s portfolio: a customer deploying one product for a narrow use case needs a very different path than a customer rolling out several products across a broader security program.
Each task guides customers through the actual work required to get those products into use. Depending on the product and use case, a plan can cover configuration steps, policy creation, technical concepts, change management, and other implementation work. BeyondTrust also connects those steps to supporting resources in BeyondTrust University and elsewhere, giving customers a direct path from the task they are working on to the guidance they need to complete it.
For example, a customer deploying Endpoint Privilege Management may need help understanding how to build policies that remove local admin rights without disrupting employees’ day-to-day work. Another customer working in Password Safe may need guidance on building smart groups and determining which accounts or systems particular administrators should be able to access. GUIDEcx gives BeyondTrust a place to organize those product-specific steps alongside the training and communication resources that support them.
The operation behind those plans is heavily automated, enabled by the GUIDEcx API. BeyondTrust uses the API to connect GUIDEcx with its internal systems and multiple applications the team built:
Tailored project plans
One application uses a survey, plus the GUIDEcx API, to turn each customer’s responses into a tailored project plan, adding the right phases, milestones, tasks, and subtasks based on the use cases they select.
Product Telemetry
Another application helps connect GUIDEcx with other systems in BeyondTrust’s stack, such as Gainsight, providing a way to bring customer signals into the onboarding workflow and move project data back into its own reporting. Devin calls this Product Telemetry. He and other leaders can see progress, task volume, selected use cases, and other onboarding data in internal dashboards without needing to open individual GUIDEcx projects.
The GUIDEcx API gives BeyondTrust room to build around its own operating model. GUIDEcx provides the structure for the customer journey, while BeyondTrust can automate how plans are created, connect onboarding data to the rest of its customer stack, and surface the information its teams need in the systems they already use.
Using the GUIDEcx API to extend beyond new-customer onboarding
BeyondTrust has also found another use for the GUIDEcx API: re-engaging customers whose adoption had stalled.
Their Gainsight setup already helps the team identify customers who have stopped logging in, have not fully deployed their licenses, or show other signs of low adoption. Through the GUIDECx API, BeyondTrust can now respond to those signals by sending a GUIDEcx plan with the steps needed to move forward.
Re-engaged in two days
In one early example, Gainsight flagged a customer that had not logged into one of BeyondTrust’s products for 30 days. The customer hadn’t configured any connectors. BeyondTrust used the API to send the customer a custom GUIDEcx project. Two days later, the customer had configured four connectors, indicating the customer was re-engaged.
Full license deployment
Another customer had deployed roughly 20% of its licenses. Within days of receiving a GUIDEcx plan, the customer had deployed all of its existing licenses and purchased additional licenses.
These early examples have expanded how BeyondTrust thinks about GUIDEcx. The team can use the same structured guidance for a brand-new customer or for an existing customer that needs help regaining momentum.
BeyondTrust is scaling the model across more products and customers
BeyondTrust launched its GUIDEcx program this summer and initially supported four products. Within roughly six weeks, the team expanded the program to six products.
The program has already changed which customers BeyondTrust can support with structured onboarding. Customers who do not purchase professional services or work with an implementation partner can now receive a detailed, use-case-specific journey without requiring BeyondTrust to assign a dedicated project manager.
Meanwhile, a pooled adoption team monitors customer responses and steps in when someone asks for help. When a customer hits a more technical hurdle, the team can bring in a technical account manager or another specialist.
As BeyondTrust expands the program, the value they see in GUIDEcx is in being able to keep the process repeatable without giving every customer the same experience.
Customers can receive a plan shaped around the products, use cases, and outcomes that matter to them, while the team still manages the program at scale.
“What’s powerful about GUIDEcx is that we can create the journey we want customers to follow and still tailor it to what each customer actually needs. We can give them a plan based on the use cases they care about instead of handing everyone the same default experience, and we can do that at scale.”
Devin, VP of Customer Success and Adoption, BeyondTrust