Customer Success is as precious as olive oil

The time for harvesting olives and producing oil, yellow gold if it is extra virgin olive oil, has just ended.

Is it a gamble to compare this precious fruit of the land with Customer Success, that is, with this new corporate function that takes care of maintaining the relationship with customers over time?

No, it's not a gamble and for at least three reasons.

Since ancient times, oil has been a precious food that mainly provided nourishment.

Similarly, the Customer Success team has as its main objective to make users of its service aware of what they have available today and if they don't know it, to nourish their knowledge with a "nutritional path" of information useful to the cause. We often call it “customer journey”.

Informing customers of how they can best use the technology they have available is extremely important to broaden the horizon and the limits that are often only in the minds of those who use it and who simply do not know what they could do: the sharing of best practices, fast demos done side by side, streamlined and targeted training courses, access to ad hoc webinars or reports from experts on the topic... these are some concrete examples of what a "nutritional path" means.

A second use of oil, often of the lampante type, was for lighting, in oil lamps.

Illuminating means being able to identify, in the sea of data at our disposal, the only one that can make the difference between surviving or not in the market or predicting the success of a new service: the Customer Success Manager can help achieve this goal by sitting next to our customer and explaining the available potential, analytical in the specific case of SAS. Years ago we talked about Data Mining, that is, the miner who finds the gold nugget among the stones and the metaphor is still absolutely valid.

The CEO's eyes light up when the young Data Scientist explains to him the result of a new research or simulation and understands its potential, but it is the Customer Success Manager who can help the Data Scientist do the best storytelling by making the best use of the software as it is: it is not enough to do well but you must also know how to present and communicate.

Finally, the third use of oil is in the mechanical sector, as a lubricant for gears and engines.

Here Customer Success plays a decisive role because, being a reliable point of reference, it has the responsibility of managing the "internal governance" of the customer's request, "lubricating" friction, delays and sometimes misunderstandings in the various corporate souls. It is an enormous added value for the customer who has a single point of reference both in the case of technical problems and internal management of various reasons.

Often the salesman leaves the company for another job or the customer's contact changes but the Customer Success Manager is always there to continue to carry out his "internal governance" role.

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In conclusion, Customer Success is truly as precious as oil because, if it is of great quality, it can improve the level of health of the innovation that each customer must promote in his company: we are in an era in which you just cannot stop the "innovation tsunami".

Every company, even small ones, should dedicate resources to Customer Success because only by starting from customers acquired over time new market shares can expand and grow.

And then if the relationship with the customer is renewed year after year and lasts over time, the development will be consolidated like this majestic centuries-old olive tree.