CUSTOMER SUCCESS FOR EVERYONE?

Not really for everyone but certainly for every company that cares about its customers and treats them always better to secure the future relationships.

As a matter of fact, Customer Success is a brand new way of conceiving the entire after-sales process with a structured methodology launched in the USA for the IT companies.

The ultimate goal is to accompany customers in the path that goes from signing the order to renewing a rental or a subscription.

They are the so-called recurring revenues which are the basis of the new economic paradigm according to which we are gradually migrating from the concept of possession (I buy a product) to usage (I use a service).

Example: if in the past it was a must to buy a car for prestige and for the pleasure of owning it ?forever, now more and more people opt for the temporary rental formula (the small car next door for the city that I book with an app ) or long-term (company car, no additional costs, just a monthly fee).

The transition from purchase to use, from product to service deserves a separate article and concerns the broad issue of digitization of products with related new access services and remote management, the so-called "servitization" which is getting popular in the industrial manufacturing world.

Recurring revenues are the basis of the income statement of every healthy company because they guarantee financial solidity and reliability over time: they are the cash flow that keeps the company going on.

But it is necessary to have a stable customer base that renews the service every year and this is where Customer Success comes into play, which has precisely the objective of "securing" recurring revenues by inducing the customer not to abandon but to renew their trust year after year .

Recurring revenues are added on top of new products/services which in turn generate recurring revenues, triggering a virtuous spiral of overall growth.

In the IT world, recurring revenues are sw/hw products maintenance or renewals of software licenses in the case of a fixed-term license, but Customer Success is applied much more extensively.

In Italy, for example, the backbone of the economy is given by the SMB, by the thousands of small-medium sized companies which, led by often enlightened entrepreneurs, have always taken special care of their customers.

The sectors potentially interested in Customer Success go far beyond the ICT market: they are the services that revolve around manufacturing companies, transport, large-scale distribution, private healthcare, tourism, and Customer Success is also essential to stop the bleeding of clients from many professional and consulting firms.

The transition is twofold: as a first step, add a service logic to the product logic by launching new specific initiatives for that market sector and as an immediately subsequent step, start a Customer Success business function which, with a rigorous methodology, induces customers to renew year after year the new services to which they have subscribed.

And how can you know which new services to launch? The simplest thing is to ask customers directly, those with whom you are most familiar, initially with an online survey (if anything with a gift to encourage response), much better by talking directly at the first opportunity: they are the ones who will give us the right answers.

Creativity is therefore needed (in Italy we are masters) and method (here much less) with a "data driven" logic by collecting and enhancing data from company databases.

Some examples of a Customer Success Manager's agenda:

1. Rank recurring revenue customers by both renewal revenue and growth potential

2. Analyze customers who have had no contact in the past year

3. Contact customers without waiting for them to call assistance when they have a problem: that is, moving from a reactive to a proactive approach, starting from the "sleeping" ones

4. Share with service users what is actually used

5. Agree areas for improvement in the use of the service, for example in the form of training

6. Accommodate specific requests, follow playbook guidelines, fix the problem, and come back with the solution

... and many more.

The Customer Success Manager must be the voice of the customer, the one who manages the relationship over time, regardless of commercial development. He must certainly know the offer but at the same time be good at understanding the state of the relationship with the customer, with that specific person, not just in a supplier-customer mode.

In such a dynamic market, with a continuous sales turnover, the Customer Success Manager is often the only person who keeps the customer's historical memory and who allows newcomers (supplier side but also customer side) to avoid starting always from scratch .

Commercial development comes as a natural evolution, as a customer request, when you don't force the times and help to use well and better what is already available today.

I therefore suggest that you do a deep insight ?on the "existing customers" instead of dedicating yourself exclusively to the hunting for new "logos": the historical customers who make repeated purchases over time and who renew their subscription to a service are those who give us the pulse of the situation, they are the ones who have never abandoned us, who have guaranteed us growth even in times of recession, crisis and pandemic. They are the real asset of any business.