In this blog post, Kevin Menezes, Sr. Manager, Customer Success, shares his best practices for getting started with Tines.
Over the past decade, I've worked closely with security leaders at all types of organizations, from Fortune 10 companies to organizations with 10 employees, as they deploy new security products to help them optimize and streamline processes. And here's what I've learned - it’s unusual - but not impossible! - to onboard customers quickly. With Tines, customers can automate complex and repetitive tasks in their first two weeks.
Today, I'm sharing 6 best practices to help new Tines customers get off to a great start with the platform, inspired by patterns that emerged among our highest-performing customers.
Let's dive in!
6 best practices for getting started with Tines
1. Take advantage of onboarding
At Tines, all our onboarding packages give your team access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) as well as a Customer Success Engineer (CSE).
During onboarding, your team will have weekly calls with your CSM and CSE. During these calls, our team can answer questions, provide guidance based on your priorities and tools, and help train your builders on Tines and story building techniques. Between weekly calls, our best customers will build and optimize stories and ask questions through Tines support channels.
2. Assign a champion(s) to manage the project
We find that customers move faster by assigning a champion to communicate and prioritize objectives with their leadership team. Our champions are part of the regular onboarding calls and have the opportunity to build and optimize stories alongside our Customer Success team during weekly calls.
3. Meet on a weekly basis with your teams
Our top-performing customers hold weekly automation meetings in which team members share what they're building with peers. These meetings serve as a collaborative space to discuss progress, challenges, and collaborate on solutions.
4. Define what you want to automate
Our best customer will prepare a list of manual tasks and processes in their day-to-day roles. They also leverage the following resources to help with planning their automations:
The Tines story library
Our library is home to 600+ workflow templates based on your various process definitions, teams and tools. The library also provides examples and guidance about how to structure a story. These can be directly imported into your tenant, and can be configured based on your processes and tools.
Some popular alert management workflow templates:
Analyze CrowdStrike detections (EDR example)
Triage Elastic Security alerts and block malicious IPs (SIEM example)
Customer case studies
Browsing our case study library is a great way to get inspiration for your first build, and get a sense of what's possible with Tines.
Some of our most popular case studies:
5. Set up and review metrics to understand Tines ROI
Our customers take advantage of the time savings metrics in the platform.
You can add the time savings metric to any story by following these steps. The easiest way to use this feature is to add the time saved from each workflow to the last action in the story.
6. Leverage the free training resources
Customers can take advantage of free training resources at Tines University.
Our self-paced courses (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) allow customers to choose an option based on their experience in the platform and understanding of automation functions and processes.
During these courses, your builders will have an opportunity to learn new concepts and apply them by building stories in our lab environment. After completing the advanced course, builders have the option to complete the Tines certification module.
Kevin has been with Tines for 3.5 years in leadership and management roles on the customer success team. Prior to Tines, Kevin led the CS team at Trustar (now Splunk).