Is Customer Success Passé?

Anecdotes are not data. Stories are not stats. I get that. I devoted a big chunk of my early career to enabling customer adoption of data analytics software at one of Canada’s most successful software companies, and subsequently IBM’s largest acquisition at the time, Cognos. The whole idea was to empower customers to make data-driven decisions versus gut-driven decisions. Data and metrics are in my DNA.

All the same, when I hear variations on a theme from 3 enterprise software companies in 3 different industry verticals in 3 weeks, my gut tingles and my brain kicks into high gear. All three companies are in the early stages of building a more pro-active customer success-like mindset, function, and discipline. And all three said variations of, “I’m not really sure I want to call this ‘customer success’. I feel like that term might be overused, and doesn’t necessarily convey the strategic significance to our customers that we’d like it to.”

And, although they don’t necessarily call it this, I see more CEOs and Customer Care Execs (with mandates for traditional Services, Customer Support, and Customer Success) using the 5 Why Framework, pioneered by Toyota, to dig under the covers of Customer Success. It goes something like this:

Why focus on customer success? To make sure we pro-actively look after our customers.

Why? So they adopt our software.

Why? So they get value from it.

Why? So they can achieve their business goals.

Why? Because if our customers are better able to achieve their business goals by using our software, they’ll renew, buy more from us, and advocate for us which helps us win new customers and grow our bottom line exponentially over time.

Good stuff! Now, layer in subtle changes I’ve noticed over the past few years in job titles of industry veterans and thought leaders who used to brand themselves as Customer Success execs, and who now brand themselves differently. Take the highly accomplished Maria Martinez for example. She was previously President, Global Customer Success at SalesForce, before becoming Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco about 2 yrs ago. And guru Lincoln Murphy, previously Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight, has branded himself a Customer-Centric Growth Expert for the past few years.

And it’s not just individuals where I’m noticing this shift. Entire departments that might traditionally have been called “Customer Success” are using different language, either to reflect shifts in thinking or to embrace unique corporate cultures, or both. Consider a few examples:

Salesforce has a “Customers For Life” Team. Kinaxis has embraced the term “Customer Excellence”. And although it refers to the more reactive customer support function, Looker has the awesomely named “Department of Customer Love.”

All of these anecdotes and observations have me wondering if there’s another way to look at Customer Success. Is Customer Success passé; a buzzword past its best before date? Or does it have a lot of life left in it?

To explore this question, I’m re-reading some Customer Success classics through a new lens, like Customer Success, by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy, and Jeanne Bliss’s Chief Customer Officer. I’m bumping the classics up against different approaches, for example, methodologies from Forrester’s Customer Experience Professional Certification that I completed recently. Lastly, I’m keeping my ear to the ground through ongoing customer conversations, for more anecdotes that yield a fuller picture.

Look forward to sharing this exploration with you in future posts in this series. 

Lauren Thibodeau empowers B2B SaaS companies to see the world through their customers' eyes. This enables them to pro-actively deliver customer value, #CrushChurn, and increase recurring revenue. Specifically, Lauren collaborates with clients to build and implement customer experience / success strategies, and software learning & adoption programs.

She's also active in building the SaaS and Customer Experience / Success community in Canada's capital city where she co-organizes the SaaS Ottawa Meetup, the Ottawa Customer Success & Customer Experience Meetup, and where she presents to start-ups and scale-ups at local Tech Incubators.