What is Customer Success?

We all want our customers to be successful right? If not then I’d ask why you are even bothering to read this. Customer Success is a newer term, it used to just mean having a happy customer that would continue to do business with you and hopefully tell a few peers about whatever it is that you sell.

At the end of the day, it’s still really just about that, however, depending on what company you work for or how your job description reads, it may mean that you are focused only on getting a renewal contract or expanding licenses or reducing support costs or something like that. Generally, focused on achieving a financial benefit for your company rather than factually helping your customer. Unfortunately, this is what a lot of “Customer Success” organizations are focused on. I’ve read a lot of job descriptions talking about how the customer is key to the employers success, yet the key activities in the job description are anything but customer focused.?

Here are a few bullets from actual live job postings for Customer Success leaders on LinkedIn right now:

• Develop, implement and evolve strategies to control client churn and maximize retention rates.
• Develop, implement and evolve strategies to increase client satisfaction and drive CSAT scores.
• Regularly report on customers' performance and progress to internal stakeholders.
• Own Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Net Upgrade (NU) goals for the Strategic Account team.
• Provide supporting oversight for complex cross-functional customer-focused activities
• Build Success Plans for all of your customers and nurture customers towards those success plans
• Build and deliver Strategic Business Reviews on a recurring basis for your customers
• Own renewals and upsells for your book of business, ensuing that both the customer and company grow together

Doesn’t say much about the customer at all does it? They talk about driving the customer to your success plans, do things to help improve your CSAT scores, reduce churn, increase revenue, blah blah blah. The customer doesn’t give a shit about your NPS score or your year over year revenue growth.? They want a product that solves their problem. Plain and simple. ?

If your customer is happy and feels that they are working with a trusted partner that cares about their outcomes, all of the business metrics that the vendor and their investors are concerned with will start happening:

• Churn will be reduced because customers typically don’t get rid of things that they’re happy with
• A happy customer will buy more of your stuff?
• A happy customer will absolutely entertain a 3 year contract if it gets them something in return
• Satisfied customers will write the Gartner reviews and take calls from prospects. ?
• Customers that feel valued will actively sell on your behalf

Now, what makes customers happy?? That is what a customer success team should be focused on:

• Understanding their needs - Just because they bought your solution doesn’t mean that they’re in complete alignment with what you do and how you want them to do it. You need to understand what the customer is doing, solve their problems first in a way that they know that it they are solved, and then work with the customer to help expand use cases and breadth of deployments
• Software solutions are a minefield.? Software breaks, shit happens.? When the inevitable happens, you need to make sure that the customer knows why something happened, that it is in fact fixed and what you will do or what they will need to do in order to avoid it happening again
• Customers have ideas about features and how things work.? Listen to them.? If you don’t have a customer advocacy group then get one started.? Customers want to be connected to other customers.? Help your customer grow their own personal brand as experts in what it is that your company sells.?
• Help them in their journey. Onboarding is a great opportunity to make a customer for life.? It is also your first chance to completely mess it up.? Customer Success and Onboarding need to be in lock step, if not the same team then at least siblings.
• Make sure the customers and your deployment roadmap are aligned.? They may not be on your schedule,? that’s fine.? Help them. If they have a different methodology that they follow to deploy stuff then the vendor needs to adjust.? Plain and simple.? You are the expert but they are the customer and will know more about their environment and politics than you can ever dream to.

Also, keep in mind that many unsuccessful customers start during the sales process. There are absolutely customers that vendors should not be doing business with for a number of reasons; The solution doesn’t fit the customers needs,? the customer is setup in a way that your solution simply won’t work (technically, philosophically, etc..), or maybe you just have someone that is just not capable of using your stuff from a skillset standpoint. Yet,? we take the deal because we need to make our number or we need the new logo or whatever.That is bullshit and it needs to stop. ?

The customer success team needs to be feeding things back to the sales and sales enablement organizations. This customer failed… here’s why. Here are the questions to ask during the technical qualification, until our product is changed, run if you get this answer. ?

Some basics but you get the idea. Customer Success isn’t a team, its a mindset that everyone in the company needs to have. If everyone from sales to support to product and marketing is focused on achieving a positive outcome for the customer,? positive outcomes for the company will absolutely follow.