Top Five Trends Driving Customer Success Growth

What does Customer Success mean to you? Why is Customer Success a growing profession? And how will Customer Success continue to evolve in the future?

We explored all this and more during the Pulse CxO Summit, an intimate gathering of Customer Success and Customer Experience leaders from across the country. A series of keynotes, panel discussions and breakouts provided the opportunity to explore the current state of Customer Success and what’s driving the demand for this growing profession.

Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta opened the event with eye popping statistics about the state of the Customer Success profession in 2019. Did you know:

• The number of Customer Success Manager job postings on LinkedIn grew by 8x between 2015-2018 in the US.
• The number of Customer Success Manager job postings on LinkedIn grew by 10x between 2019-2018 outside the US.
• The number of Customer Success job postings on LinkedIn grew by 84% between 2017-2018

What’s the difference between Customer Support and Customer Success? And what are the implications for you and for your organization?

Customer support remains a critical function. Because even the best products and processes break down. And your customers need a way to get help and resolution when that breakdown occurs.

Customer success builds a bridge between when a customer buys and when what a customer buys breaks.

Fixing what’s broken isn’t enough to develop and to sustain loyal customers over the long term. And neither is building a business case without revisiting whether or not the goals of the business case were realized.

Enter Customer Success - the critical function that helps customers realize their goals, capture ROI, extract and deliver business value, and discover new paths to growth. Customer Success Managers help shift customer relationships and focus from, “How do we fix what’s broken now?” to “Where do we have the potential to go together?”

Pipeline growth and customer loyalty are only two factors driving the rapidly rising investment in Customer Success functions.

Ashvin Vaidyanathan, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, highlighted five factors accelerating Customer Success momentum heading into 2020:

• Operationalizing Outcomes: Customer Success functions drive the cultural evolution from Reactive > Informed > Scalable > Transformative customer engagements. These teams play a critical role in migrating the organization from a “break-fix, escalation” mindset to a “customer success is a team sport” mindset.
• Customer Data Infrastructure: Delivering personalized customer experiences at scale relies heavily on clean, consolidated customer data. And Gainsight suggest that data is the #1 impediment to becoming more customer centric.
• Product Takes Center Stage: Customer Success Managers play a critical role in closing the gap between value delivered by a company’s products and their customers’ desired outcomes. From driving product adoption to eliciting feedback for future roadmap priorities, Customer Success is key to the conversation.
• From Customer Success to Customer Growth: According to Altify’s recent Customer Revenue Optimization benchmark study, companies project 58% of their growth in the next 12-18 months will come from existing customers. Existing companies cite experience as the top factor influencing future purchases, according to Gartner. And Customer Success is critical to delivering a differentiated customer experience.
• Human First Leadership: How often do you bring your experience expectations from home to work? And how frequently are you disappointed? You’re not alone. B2B CX index ratings significantly lag behind those of B2C, according to McKinsey & Co. B2C companies typically score in the 65% to 85% range, while B2B companies average less than 50%. This gap will become even more apparent as B2B customer expectations rise.

Whether you’re ready to elevate your existing Customer Success team or invest in building a new Customer Success team, “customer” is the common denominator.

To start a Customer Success dialogue within your company, ask:

1. Who are our key customer segments?
2. How do we measure success for each customer segment? 
3. When was the last time we refreshed our segmentation and metrics?
4. Who are the most critical customers for us to retain?
5. What would it take to pilot a Customer Success program with one of our top customers?

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Karen Mangia is VP, Customer & Market Insights at Salesforce, Chair of the Customer Experience Council for the Conference Board, TEDx speaker and author of "Success With Less." Views are her own.