Customer success at Adaptiva goes far beyond resolving tickets. Every interaction is a chance to learn, improve, and innovate. For Dan Richings, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success and Solutions at Adaptiva, listening to customers is what drives Adaptiva’s product roadmap. From simplifying installations to guiding cloud migrations, Adaptiva turns feedback into real improvements that make customers’ lives easier.
In part two of our Q&A series with Dan, we explore how Adaptiva’s support team turns customer feedback into lasting innovation and where AI could take customer success next.
Dan, in the first part of our conversation, you mentioned customer surveys. How does customer feedback help shape Adaptiva’s product innovation and roadmap?
Dan: A lot of our roadmap is driven directly by feedback that comes through support tickets, feature requests, regular customer satisfaction check-ins, and now our new Customer Advisory Board. If a feature request is raised and we don’t currently have it, we log it with engineering and it gets prioritized accordingly. And because we’re an agile company, we can act quickly and include customer-driven changes in our monthly or quarterly releases.
So, how do you balance immediate customer requests with long-term innovation?
Dan: It’s all about priorities. Some requests are raised by one customer but benefit many, while others are more niche. We focus on improvements that will have the biggest impact across the board and prioritize those. Then, as the roadmap allows, we slot in smaller ones or adapt them to benefit a wider audience. What we won’t do is implement something for one customer that creates problems for others.
Can you share an example of feedback leading to product improvements?
Dan: A good example is the Installer update. We were hearing the same thing from both customers and our own pre-sales team: setup could be smoother, especially around network prerequisites. Our product requires things like URLs to be whitelisted and ports to be opened, and if those aren’t in place, you hit issues during proof of concepts or implementations.
That feedback went straight to engineering, and we built an update that automatically checks for those prerequisites during setup. Now, if ports aren’t open or requirements aren’t met, the installer flags it immediately so it can be fixed on the spot. It’s a relatively small change, but it saves a lot of time and prevents frustration later in the deployment process.
What about Adaptiva’s recent cloud release? How has your team supported customers during migrations?
Dan: We could have easily just published a user guide, but we wanted to take it further.
So, we are now offering what’s basically free consulting. Our support team will join customer calls, walk customers through the migration, and make sure everything runs smoothly. It’s going a little further to provide a personal touch and reassurance, not just saying “here’s the manual” but “let’s do this together.” That makes a big difference.
Looking ahead, where do you see AI playing a role?
Dan: We’ve already started experimenting with AI within our support portal. We have a chatbot that directs customers to knowledge base articles, but we want it to evolve into a true assistant that can answer questions directly. Down the road, we see opportunities to build AI into the product itself that can perform tasks autonomously. For support, AI right now means quick, good answers in seconds, but we’ll always balance that with our personal, human-first approach.
Final Thoughts
From simplifying installations to guiding cloud migrations, Adaptiva’s support team proves that customer input isn’t just heard, it’s acted upon.
If you missed part one of our conversation with Dan, check it out to see how Adaptiva’s single-tier, customer-first support model builds trust and elevates customer success.
