Customer Success Must-Haves

Recently, I was asked what is the most important thing in building Customer Success in a company. Can you simply bring all your knowledge and experience into a company and lower churn and increase expansion? Are the right skills and experience just enough to trigger change and growth?

I believe success is built based on the solid ground. And having or lacking that ground is the reason why some companies and teams succeed and others fail. Here are the three key ingredients without which it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to make the changes needed to build a rock solid strategy that would make your customers love your brand.

• Support from the CEO and top management
• Company culture
• Trust in you

Support from the CEO and Top Management

If you and your manager—whether it’s the CEO or a top manager—have different values, you will constantly argue and defend your point of view.

Choose a manager who shares your values. Everyone wants to make money. This is business, and that’s right. But behind this, there is always some core value. If you want to create a great product that your clients will love, and you genuinely want to understand how to help them (while also growing the business), but they only care about making money without focusing on long-term customer relationships, they won’t be invested in the decisions you make. This means they won’t support implementing these decisions or internal changes. And often, such changes need to start from the very top.

Conversely, if the CEO and top management are customer-focused, reaching agreements will be much easier, and implementing processes and improving customer experiences will happen faster and more smoothly. It will also be easier to find resources for this. And if they trust you, it might even feel like you’ve grown wings.

In any case, instead of trying to instill values that don’t exist in management, find those who already share your mindset.

Company Culture

When only Customer Success thinks about the clients, that’s not Customer Success. That’s account management, technical support, service—anything but Customer Success. CS means you work cross-functionally, taking efforts to improve the customer experience at various levels, meaning you interact with marketing, sales, and product, at a minimum.

The extent to which these other functions are willing to work with you depends 50% on the company culture—whether people are open to change at all, whether there is a shared vision, and whether people align with it. The other 50% is about trust. And that's something you should invest in and learn how to build.

If your company lacks a customer-centric culture, you will spend more time building relationships with the team and explaining what Customer Success even is. Remember, you can only share what you have within yourself. The company’s culture will influence how you communicate with your clients. And if there is no customer focus in the culture, clients will pick up on it immediately.

While you’re busy fixing this part within the company, you won’t have time to think about the actual client.

Trust from Top Management and Employees

Shared values and culture can give rise to the boldest ideas, but to freely and calmly test or implement them, you need the trust of the people around you.

Customer Success is often about breaking the system. HubSpot, in its Inbound strategy, loves to say that "marketing is broken," and I like to say that "customer service is broken."

The problem with a lack of trust is that instead of trusting you and acting based on your validated hypotheses, people keep wasting time on more checks rather than taking action. This will distract you from the main goal and hold you back.

In a world of change, sometimes you need to take a leap of faith to find a solution. Here, it’s crucial that people trust you—that you understand your clients well enough to know where to go. At the same time, you must have the right to make mistakes. It is from this kind of attitude that new, unconventional solutions are born.

Does that mean that I as a Customer Success Manager should not join a company where there's one of these key ingredient lacking? Does that mean that we as a company should not be adding a Customer Success Manager to our team if we struggle with some of these?

No, all that means is these are the must-haves to work towards. But it also means that there's a huge difference in the results where these three exist and where they do not. In the first case, all your efforts go to the customer, in the second one most of it go to internal customers.

As a Customer Success Manager you invest in both, but the easier it is for you to work internally, the better resources - mental, creative and time related can be spent on finding solutions for the customers. The same for the companies - the better culture they create, the better value they get out of Customer Success programs.