Seven predictions that will drive Customer Success in 2022

Where is the Customer Success movement going?

Here we are again, end of the year 2021 and the time is right to share some personal thoughts on where the community may be heading in the future.

Naturally, not all the predictions I wrote about last year materialized but all of them evolved in some shape or form and certainly were on top of mind for many.

A special note deserves one prediction, which ended up being quite accurate: Customer Success has gone mainstream. Let’s be honest: businesses across industries, especially subscription businesses but not limited to, are obsessed with Customer Success.

At the time of writing, there’s 274,553 results on LinkedIn when looking for Customer Success Manager jobs worldwide. In spring of 2021 the same search yielded 76,000 results.

With 96% of organizations having a dedicated Customer Success function in their company as The State of Customer Success 2021 report states, it’s clear that Customer Success is on fire.

This is not just thanks to the rise of software as a service or SaaS in the global software panorama - Customer Success is thriving in a number of industries, from manufacturing to hospitality.

And that is not really surprising:

Customer Success Managers are at the front line for customer interactions, working with customers (or should I say “for” customers?) to optimize their experience.

Customer Success is really all about partnering with the customers, to ensure their experience with a company product or service is augmented, thus that their feedback and requests flow back in the organization with energy and as a consequence product portfolio and quality of the services improve. The aim is that these match the needs of the end users. In other words – Customer Success benefits customers and the companies that develop products.

With this in mind, it is no coincidence that Customer Success is continuing to mature and grow as a profession: a recent study which found that 91% of organizations had increased their team in size over the past 12 months.

Having self-established in the business world, customer success is now essential to the healthy development of any company – even non-SaaS.

There is no doubt that 2021 was a big year for customer success. Wait until you see 2022!

Where will customer success evolve next year? Some of the themes that I predicted last year will continue to accelerate, but new trends have obviously surfaced.

Looking at what was on the list last year, and adding a few new thoughts, here’s my predictions of what will be popular for us in 2022:

?? Customer Success teams become allies to customer ambitions

As companies continue their journeys into accelerating their foothold in the digital domain with modernization, increased efficiencies and new exiting services, they will also need to evolve and use foundational services at their fullest, in order to keep up with the pace of end user product progress and also consistently lead on the competition.

Realizing business value becomes the ultimate goal and Customer Success can be instrumental in achieving that swiftly.

This motion will further fuel the investment in Customer Success, as it gradually becomes from a mere company function, to an allyship engine to realize customers ambition and potential.

Customer Success is all about realizing value and value realization is the fuel for customer growth and realization.

Further expansion of the pivotal importance of Customer Success will also happen thanks to two distinct and independent industry dynamics: firstly, as the battle of the subscription progressively moves to the land of adoption, the need for somebody who is both intimate with what your product or service does and at the same time with what that customer in its specific industry is trying to achieve will become essential. Secondly, companies without a Customer Success engine will be left out by natural selection: both customers and companies will need this customer-centric philosophy to be thriving. Or they will fade out.

As more organizations multiply their sphere of influence with the smart use of channel partners, I also predict that Customer Success Managers fully dedicated to enabling partners to enable their customer’s success will flourish: the movement will expand horizontally across ISVs and Solution/Service Providers: it’s important to ensure the partner’s establishing of a customer success operation so that they can bring success vertically to more customers. This will require that the organization enables partners to mature and be independent in areas like operations, telemetry, onboarding, playbooks and in general all the good direct customer success motions. Customer Success Managers for Partners will not engage with end customers directly, but guide partners in their journey.

As investment in digital grows, subscription models will flourish and Customer Success investments will grow with it. For the mutual benefits of all.

?? Telemetry

Last year I spoke about harnessing the “power of meshed data” to drive customer outcomes. This was about ensuring Customer Success Managers had he right information to proactively inform and guide customer behaviours and adoption.

Whilst this is still a valid concept, and its implementation will greatly depend on the scope and size and industry in which they operate, I think we will see a shift in 2022: we will gradually look at automation and AI to auto-magically build the resources customers need in order to free up valuable Customer Success Managers time, so they can focus on more strategic plays, out of the band guidance or simply identifying opportunities for growth.

Our world will populate with predictions of what the customer needs and automatic execution of playbooks with minimal human interactions. Users will still have control of the level of automation, but many aspects of technology adoptions will turn into commodity. Think at a scenario where a single user, who has their own specific habits, may benefit from a different use of a service and how that specific behaviour would trigger a flow that guides the user to change that habit, in order to be more successful in doing their job or maybe protecting their time.

This will also mean

infusing tech touch with AI and considering this as the minimum viable product for all Customer Success motions, which would therefore apply seamlessly to all customers.

A white glove service can then double up for a subset of “focus” customers. The new ways your team find in the latter, can then permeate to the tech touch level and feed the automation.

We are really talking about supporting the democratization of Customer Success by means of fuelling personalization, curated personally by automation which leverages the power of usage data.

? Going beyond onboarding

A positive onboarding experience provides peace of mind that customers made the right choice. It also, ultimately, helps you retain them.

However

a good onboarding will require data (again!) to support the focus on a personalized experience.

In order to gather such data, two motions will expand in the future: firstly, a swift handover process from the sales team will be instrumental in knowing everything about the conversations and the expectations that the customer had in the pre-sales phase. Whether that is an internal handover meeting, a document with the details or an embedded Customer Success business development person – it actually does not make the difference, provided this is seen as a collaborative effort across the marketing-sales-customer success chain.

The second element that we will see in the future is the implementation of a “Discovery” meeting: a way for the Customer Success Manager to connect with the customer between sales and onboarding, in order to learn about customer expectations, level of maturity and autonomy in deploying the service and finally a way to position the value of the Customer Success team.

?? NPS is deprecated and NRR becomes the King (or Queen) metric

In a subscription world – disruption is the new order, adoption is the new power and consumption is the new currency. But growth is all that counts, as healthy growth is reliant on retaining and growing existing customers.

Whilst the way to achieve growth is with meaningful and healthy relationships and relentless execution, the King (or Queen) of KPIs is Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

Some organizations still use NPS or a variant of “customer satisfaction” measurement, but too often this is a flaky measurement - not effectively connected to the long term bottom line: think of how many times you got a low NPS from a customer simply because you asked at the wrong time - when the audience was annoyed for a badly managed support case for example, whilst the overall health of the customer investment was at its pinnacle?

People say that NRR is the metric of Customer Success. Naturally, Customer Success has a big impact on the whole post sales cycle: retention, upselling, cross-selling and even renewals. I see Customer Success as the Business Development in all those areas. However, our engagement is not limited to that: in fact we are the face of the company we represent.

Whether that is about a support experience, or the products’ speed of innovation, or the people behind billing motions.. we are there and we facilitate the involvement of the right people and ensure they do not lose focus or energy.

All the elements above have something in common: they all influence NRR.

NRR captures the impact of new and churning customers, as well as existing customers who choose to upgrade or expand their use of a company’s product over time. NRR indicates company momentum

so investment in NRR requires that the entire company works synchronously and cross-functionally.

The best way to improve NRR is to bring all the departments together, and agree on the same goal – long term value for customers.

And the above wording is exactly the key here: all the departments together. NRR is going to be more and more the measurement for company progress, the company momentum. It’s not a surprise that NRR is consistently regarded as a way to measure the financial health of businesses.

As an example to explain the power of NRR, a recent research states that for a $1B revenue SaaS company, a mere 1% increase in NRR could translate into more than $700M in enterprise value.

I think the relevance of NRR across companies will be elevated as the measure of a company performance – for which everybody will have to play a part in.

?? People Customer Success First

Customer Success should not advocate for the Success of the customer base only, but should also advocate for the Success of its own people. This is not just a mantra for any Customer Success leadership team, but for everybody involved – including the team members themselves.

Given the current situation and movements like the #GreatResignation, we’re going to be in a?very?tight labour market.

?Some experts estimate that there will be close to 20 million jobs in the US open in 2022.

The expansion ambitions of any company today is limited mainly by one factor: their ability to hire the right talent.

To compensate for the lack of ready to go professionals on the market, especially in a relatively new discipline like Customer Success, there will be an increased attention on internal hiring. This will go along with an upgraded company culture and therefore mindsets, as well as an upskilling and redeployment of people inside the company.

New EMSI research shows that even for essential workers, over the last two years there was a?40% increase in the share of postings offering on-the-job training: we need to build new professionals.

You’ll be hiring people based on potential and cultural complement, rather than skills or experience.

?The key will be opening the door to a more diverse range of candidates, which for Customer Success is not necessarily a bad thing

in my opinion, the main traits of a Customer Success Manager are Emotional Intelligence, a positive and altruist attitude, curiosity, empathy and a lot of communication skills (not to mention the ability to play as a customer therapist). All these can be sourced from people coming from different walks of life, so expanding the pool is not just convenient, but also necessary. Actually the more diverse pool, the better it is. If you are excited about #Diversity, I invite you to read my thoughts on hiring for diversity here.

You will need to hire for potential and capability, then train people as they arrive.

By turning the whole organization into one that values the unique contributions of people, by treasuring their professional and personal growth, and by swapping the requirement for hard skills (these can be taught), into mastering soft skills with the one of inducing healthy values, you can create an environment where people can thrive and the sky becomes the limit (beyond the clouds ??).

My prediction is that

we will turn our attention to our people and create a new psychological safe environment with them and for them, so that they will thrive by staying in the team

it will be a matter of building next steps together and becoming successful thanks to the others and the environment they are in. Sort of a People Customer Success first philosophy.

After all, you would not teach your kids a profession these days, rather reusable skills like resiliency, the art of networking or how to evaluate risks. And make sure they have the tools to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, whatever life may throw at them.

?

?? Customer Success Managers will become specialists

Whilst the Customer Success movement scales, expands to channel partners and recruits more troops, there will inevitably be a trend towards specialization.

Customers will want to speak to experts that understand not only about their industries, but also about their specific technology challenges.

They will want to learn what worked for their competitors, or what nobody has never dared trying.

They will want to get access to advice and opinions from people that understand about artificial intelligence, or application development, or sustainable solutions or even quantum computing. Of course, this will be on top of vertical industry knowledge, ethnicity fit or even specific attitudinal empathy (e.g. you want to assign an introverted team player to an introverted customer): after all our job is about having humans able to team up and advocate for other humans, and affinity becomes important in order to take control of conversations and create long lasting relationships.

?? Customer Success Managers will be the product ambassadors and messengers

Customer Success Managers are the ones who actually experience most how your customers use your service. They know what the customers are and are not actually using, their habits, their hesitations. They also know what capabilities they will need to get value. ?

By acting as a bridge from your customers to your product teams, your customer builds a trusted relationship with the developers and also become proud in influencing the roadmap and direction, so that your product can eventually become more and more useful.

We will see a lot more of these bridges in 2022, as

Customer Success transforms into ambassadors for their customers and at the same time messengers for the product teams.

Let’s see how these predictions play out. One thing is for sure:

Customer Success will continue to grow as organizations see how this mindset (not this department!) brings value to on end user consumption and an impact on financial growth.

2022 we are ready - bring it on! It feels good to be here ??

How do you see Customer Success in 2022?

#CustomerSuccess #customerexperience #CustomerSuccessExcellence #CSM #SaaS #Growth #SubscriptionEconomy #B2BSaaS #2022 #Predictions2022