Customer Success == Successful Customers

(or "Why everyone should be part of your 'Customer Success' organization")

A couple of moths ago I was at Gainsight's Pulse Europe event, this isn't a review of or comment on that conference (for a much better precis than I could provide, go here), but it did get me thinking about Customer Success again; what it really means and how we deliver it to our customers and within our companies.

We tend to label the parts of a business dealing with customers after the sale closes as "Customer Success".  This might include Consultancy, Technical Support, Education, Account Management and several other disciplines; but the problem of bundling them together under that label is that it risks paying lip-service to a fashion without really changing the way you engage with your customers.  You can create the impression that you've bought-in to the new approach without ever actually delivering on it. Doing as Sir Humphrey Appleby said "Always dispose of the difficult bit in the title..." (Yes Minister season 1, ep 1, about 17 mins in).

To imply that responsibility for Customer Success belongs to one part of the company like this is pointless or even self-defeating.  If your customers are not successful by their own definitions then all parts of the business will be affected, so everyone must be invested in achieving their goals. Calling one team Customer Success suggests that other groups (Product Development, New-Logo Sales, Finance...) don't have to worry about it, and that's just wrong.

Dan Steinmann of Gainsight says CS > CSM; Customer Success is bigger than the Customer Success Manager, and he's right, but the challenge of creating this culture is big enough in a start-up.  In an established company it's huge; one business unit will say they don't need to be engaged 'because *our* customers are already successful'; Sales aren't interested because they only get paid on new-license deals, not renewals; Product Management are only interested in new features, rather than defects and back-porting fixes to older versions... 

All of these attitudes need to change for Customer Success to take hold and that will only come with time, persistence and, above all, consistent prioritization and support at a senior level. Without that support and drive, you risk disappointing your customers when they find out that, for all your good intentions, their actual experience hasn't changed one jot!

You need to ensure that everyone has a stake in Customer Success from the developers who build the products, to the person who sells them, the engineer supporting them and the renewal rep sending the bill; and the leadership to drive this change has to come from the very top.

As a starting point for this, we need a unified definition of what Customer Success is. To a sales person it means they're buying more licenses, to a support rep that they give high CSAT scores and to a CSM that they're renewing and expanding. These are all elements of the picture but I think they miss the point. Customer Success means that the customer is achieving whatever objectives drove them to buy your product in the first place. As vendors we need to spend the time and energy to understand those objectives and to align ourselves to help customers achieve them.

The organizations that 'get' Customer Success make it a top-down, side-to-side responsibility for the whole company, focused on achieving the value for the customer that validates the business case to buy their products.

Only with your whole organization aligned that way will you get truly Successful Customers, and that's surely the one definition of Customer Success that matters...