What Is Software Success?

Insurance Policy

What is software success? Just like everything in IT, it depends. Are you a cloud software vendor? A large customer? A small customer? A third-party IT provider? Software success depends on your perspective.

For a cloud software vendor, like Salesforce, NetSuite, Box, or one of over ten thousand other cloud software vendors, software success is customer success. Customer success, however, is primarily an insurance policy to make sure that customers get value from the licenses they purchase and, as a result, continue as a customer. Consequently, vendors spend lots of time and money on their largest customers and less time with smaller accounts. The key to customer success from any perspective, however, is to begin with a success plan into which everyone buys in. More on that in a future article.

Large Enterprise Customers

For very large, enterprise customers, like Apple, Microsoft or JP Morgan – who happen to be the 3 most valuable companies today in terms of market cap – they will have an internal IT department that guides and directs the deployment and utilization of whatever cloud software is purchased. They will work with the vendor’s customer success team to develop mutually agreed upon success plans that almost always include special customizations for their unique business model. Their success plans will heavily leverage all of the vendor’s available resources. They may also engage a third-party IT provider to focus specifically on the use cases of the various groups of end-users to help them quickly get value from new software and to interface with the vendor to make sure the proper emphasis is being applied to any issues that arise. A lot of the success of these programs relies on role-specific training that is rolled out alongside the implementation.

Small and Medium Sized Businesses

For small and medium sized businesses, often a third-party IT provider will monitor all of the cloud software implementations with a focus on making sure that each end-user is being as productive as possible with the software they have been provided. Once again, a success plan at the outset sets the stage for milestones and metrics that must be achieved. More on that in a future article. Often times they will also monitor cloud software usage across the organization to identify areas of improvement. If people need more training, they will either coordinate that with the vendor or provide it themselves. If licenses are going unused, they will adjust those appropriately. They might also help with application rationalization projects if a significant portion of the software they are paying for is no longer useful to the organization.

Complex and Underutilized

No matter what anyone says, cloud software is not only complex, but also grossly underutilized. By helping companies better utilize currently available cloud software already purchased and judiciously add new offerings only when necessary, software success managers can greatly enhance productivity delaying as long as possible the massive expense of the next cool idea in cloud software. I've learned the secrets to making customer software deployments successful as measured by productivity, ROI, loyalty, retention, satisfaction, adoption and active use results. In future articles, I'll share how each of these metrics can be used in success plans as criteria for objectively measuring progress toward our goals to provide users with tangible value as quickly as possible.

Got a customer success or cloud software success resource in your company? I'd love to hear to what extent you are using it.

Questions or comments? Want to know more? Can’t wait for the next article?

Email me at mattallen59@gmail.com or call me at 919-349-2113