What really is 'Customer Success' ?

I had the same question ~ 3 years back when I heard this term for the first time from my younger brother, who then was working for a SaaS startup in Bangalore. He then explained me the little he knew and asked me to read a few articles by Lincoln Murphy. Although I could understand what I was reading, nothing really registered in my head.

Our co-founder then, Satya, explained me CS with a simple diagram, as below.

I slowly started understanding a little about Customer Success in my small tenure in that company.

After which, only a few months before I got hear this term again in my current company E2Open. With the little I knew, with the lot I read and with no experience of Customer Success, I got into the role of a Customer Success Manager a couple of months back as part of my transition to Canada. Fortunately, I got an exceptional mentor, my manager, who hand held me and trained me on this role and guided me to the right people for the right answers. With first-hand experience working for multiple customers/accounts and guidance from my team, I believe that I have started learning the mantras of Customer Success.

But now, the challenge is to explain this term to the people, your family, friends and social media, who hear it for the first time. And the tougher challenge is to break a few myths around Customer Success and how I believe that it is not an 'old wine in a new bottle'.

Below is my small take on this.

1. Customer Advocacy: Customer Success Manager is a self-less person in an organization, a client/customer can talk to and expect to be advocated or protected of their views or points with the vendor company. So it's like you work for the customers' benefits while get paid by your company. A Customer's agent if we can call it in simple.
2. Multi-faceted: Technology + Functional + Business. Customer Success Manager is a clear example of, " Jack of all trades, Master of 'One' ". He/she needs to understand the technology when interacting with the Engineering team, needs to understand the Product and the domain when communicating with Professional Services and/or Product Management, and lastly has to understand the math, numbers, short term, long term losses and gains etc., which makes him/her the master in bringing more revenue to both the sides.
3. Strategic Investment: Customer Success is a serious business. Customer Success is a long-term strategic investment for a company as a business function. I might be too young or an amateur to this whole new business function. However, I find Customer Success as a distinct business function, very vital and definitely different from the other commonly compared functions such as Account management or Customer Support.

For a fact, it is independent of how an organization would want to look at this new business function as. Not hard to adapt while it is a continuous process.

I sincerely request you to please correct me if I did understand anything incorrectly and misstated anything above.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

Thank you for reading.

#CSM #CustomerSuccess #CSMrocks #E2Open