Is Customer Success achieving its full potential?

Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to witness firsthand and hear from secondary sources about the challenges businesses have with implementing a Customer Success (CS) function. It should be so simple, right? But rhetoric aside, if you are reading this post, you already know it isn’t. Moreover, the lack of repeatable and predictable CS processes increases concerns about whether CS can be a reliable revenue driver for organizations.

By now, and over the last decade, most recurring revenue businesses have understood the importance of implementing CS within their organizations. However, CS is often kept as a siloed function at the organizational level, fighting to become a cross-functional paradigm without achieving it. Call it legacy, red tape, org chart protectionism; the result is a forum constrained Customer Success instead of managing value-based outcomes specific to the individual customer. Yes, customers are discrete from each other and may value your service differently; but how do you account for, scale with and report on such variability? Unfortunately, too many organizations use CS as a bandaid for customer retention. Too often, the CS function is left supporting aspects of a product or service that it has little influence over without the means to dive into the spectrum of value the “right” customers might seek, leading to burnout for the client-facing team and irritation at the leadership level.

Even if you are fortunate enough to have the backing from your business leadership to build a CS function within your organization, the work to be done is herculean. “Transformation” aside, understanding the data and turning it into actionable insight is an ever-evolving objective; I have come to realize that Customer Success is a lot about Change Management. Customer Success is not a static future state achieved after putting some processes and systems in place; audit, plan, and adapt is CS lot. Success means something different for different clients. Understanding, measuring, and reporting the specific and discreet value-based outcomes your customer is looking for is the leading edge that will define the future of CS. However, it will remain challenging to predict CS-driven revenue reliably if industrialized retention is the CS lot instead of driving success through discrete and specific value-based outcomes.

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