I spent three days last week at Coupa Inspire 2018 event in San Francisco, and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions of the event. Knowing a thing or two about planning and executing conferences from my previous job, it was clear to me that Coupa is experiencing impressive growth in its user base. The Fairmont Hotel, site of the event, was completely taken over by Coupa for the week and was bursting at the seams with customers, prospects and Coupa employees. The event was well attended, with 1,500 – 2,000 participants, making it the largest Coupa Inspire. One positive impression from the conference that stood out to me was Coupa’s focus on the customer, or as they like to call it ‘The Community’. One of the main themes at the event was how Coupa is “Leveraging Community Intelligence,” which I discuss in detail below.
Leveraging Community Intelligence
Coupa subscribes to the mentality that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual pieces. Coupa believes in leveraging the collective knowledge for the benefit of all, and are putting this into action with its upcoming product releases. One thing I heard that I found particularly interesting was that 50% of the new features in each product release come from the user community. Listening to your user community and leveraging their subject matter expertise makes obvious sense. I spoke with two specific Coupa customers who told me about Coupa’s willingness to listen to their requests/needs as well as incorporate changes into the solution. These were key factors for those customers in selecting Coupa, and their satisfaction with the solution going forward. Over the years, I have seen companies agree to add features to its solutions in order to secure a large deal. The two customers I spoke with were not large deals, but rather small to medium in size, but they still found a willing partner to listen and work with to address their needs.
Community Intelligence Enhancements in the New Release
Community intelligence related enhancements are prominent in Coupa’s latest product release announced at the event. With an eye toward leveraging community intelligence, including applying prescriptive learning, this release focuses on business fraud, category spend, and employee responsiveness. Below are three solution enhancements introduced at the event:
- Coupa Spend Guard, currently available in its early access program, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze employee spend transactions to help detect potential fraud. Coupa states that an important difference is that the solution analyzes employee behaviors across all spend applications on the Coupa platform to help detect potential fraud.
- Commodity Insights is intended to help businesses optimize category spend and identify top suppliers for critical commodities while providing users with information on the suppliers in the form of benchmarks and recommendations to maximize spend value.
- Approver Cycle Times is a new feature that enables users to compare the time they take to approve an invoice vs. that of others in the approval cycle process. Being able to pinpoint who, and where, your bottlenecks are in terms of approvals is very important, and is functionality that has been around for a while. It will be interesting to see how organizations leverage letting users see how they compare to others at approving invoices.
Final Thoughts
Most organizations say they put their customers first (if they don’t, they really should) but this ‘focus’ is not always readily apparent to the observer. At the Coupa Inspire 2018 conference, a ‘community first’ mentality was evident from Coupa CEO, Rob Bernshteyn’s opening keynote to the end of the conference. Building in requested features makes customers and prospects feel they are part of the process, and that their input matters. This is a good recipe for building a loyal and engaged user base. This customer first approach has served Coupa well to-date, as evidenced by the growth of its customer base over the past decade.
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