Why AI, Value Creation and Constant Learning is the future of Customer Success

Customer Success is a career in danger, AI is the path of the future, and your favorite customers may just be watermelons: green on the outside, but bright red and ready to churn beneath the surface. What are you going to do about it?

If you’re anything like me, the answer is learn more - so off I went, last Tuesday, to the Customer Conference in Dublin. Impressively, they managed to fit eleven high impact sessions into one day and for those of you who like SparkNotes, here’s a summary of the three that impacted me the most:

1?? éanna Cunnane - Global head of professional services, Workspace @ Google

I wasn’t going to leave you dangling with clickbait for too long: it was Google’s Global Head of Professional Services éanna Cunnane who started off the day with the topic we’ve all been starting to wrap our heads around: the seeming inevitability of another recession and the question of whether Customer Success managers (CSMs) truly add value to organizations.

In his words, “Customer Success is all about mutual value creation”. But how do you do it? His session, Customer Success is an Outcome, but who cares? dove right into the three types of structures Customer Success managers operate in, and explained why only one of them can be commercially viable.?

A safety net CSM: Usually found in start ups and ultimately an impediment to growth, safety net CSMs solve for absolutely everything and anything and end up not having the energy or time to really get any balls rolling.

An Assistant CSM: So helpful! For anyone! For everyone! Does marketing need a hand? Sales? Assistants are great! Except for when it comes to specializing in what it is the customer actually needs.

A Retainer CSM: Specialized in customer retention and focused on where they can really add value to clients. These are the ones who are actually commercially viable for everyone involved.

So let’s stay focused on that commercially viable piece. How do you attribute success to a role that’s occasionally ambiguous in what it contributes? No one can really slice up a renewal and state that 25% of it was due to Customer Success - and as éanna says, Customer Success is now too wallowing in the “psychological grief of sales and marketing, of not knowing what to prove as the cause of purchase”.?It's not a bad time to make friends with the finance department and start proving what you can prove.

What we do know is that every customer has different needs and motivations, and salespeople are strapped to the max and operate on a quarterly basis. Ergo, the ones definitely contributing money don’t necessarily have the luxury of long term strategy. That’s where a nice opportunity comes along for those of us who aren’t signing deals: that of finding our true North Star.

“Focus on deprioritizing what you cannot deliver impact in, what other teams are doing better, and what has no commercial value. What you choose to be good at should involve commercial impact uniquely attributable to your team with relevance to others.”

éanna’s believes it's time to step away from the notion of happy customers into the world of successful customers. Stop focusing on retaining: get to know your clients financial objectives instead, consult strategically, and focus on acceleration.

After all, the greatest measurable success you can bring to the table (and the finance department) is the active growth of your clients: not how much they spend, but how much your products help them earn. Now is the time to prove Customer Success is worth investing in, “because the last recession proved that strategic investments, instead of indiscriminate cost cutting, lead to better business outcomes”.?

2?? Daphne Lopes - Head of Customer Success @ Hubspot?

It’s almost as if they planned this, but the next session rolled right into how you actually can help your clients grow - and how AI could help you do it. Daphne Lopes, head of Customer Success at Hubspot, was the second speaker of the day - and she dropped some words of wisdom that had me scrambling for a pen.?

Her session, Connected Growth – when Customer Success really translates into your company success, started off with a great (not so) fun fact:

• Most customers' health status is green when they cancel - meaning the tool is being used.?

So if usage alone doesn’t dictate success, what does?

Rather than measuring licenses activated and log-ins, it seems Customer Success is positioned to drive real impact by measuring what Daphne labels real outcomes. Our goal should shift from clicks to being true allies to our clients: driving their revenue, their productivity, and their satisfaction.?

Daphne’s solution? Data is king, and to determine how to help customers succeed, we first need to know what they’re doing. Who is the most successful? Which product configurations do they have? What is their behavior like?

Daphne says the big question when it comes to those green clients, the watermelons who are logged in but checked out, is “how is value and success being communicated?”

The goal should be that our clients have achieved XYZ growth and XYZ profit: logins alone can't communicate success. ?If we want to support our clients in succeeding, we need to align ourselves with their goals. And once we’ve got the data, we can use machine learning to identify genuine best practices and set our customers up for success.

If Customer X has followed a set formula to succeed, then data + AI can propose that formula to a different client with the same goals.?

I can’t speak for anyone else here, but one of the most common questions I get asked as a Customer Success Manager is ‘what’s everyone else doing?’. According to Daphne, the future is a solution in which clients don’t just get an answer (GDPR has been keeping me vague) but in which they’re continuously guided by the behavior of top performers in their field.?

A system that generates in-tool auto-prompts wouldn’t make Customer Success redundant: we’d still be helping clients implement suggestions, navigate change and manage nuanced use cases. What it would do is turn a lot of watermelons into… brussel sprouts, I guess??

Because if we can prove our products create profit for our clients instead of being a cost center, then everyone wins.?

From my perspective, AI might still be out of reach for some companies. But that shouldn't stop you from annually interviewing your top performing clients and using them them to create a blueprint... unless of course, they want to keep the secrets of their success secret. Still, there's no harm in asking.

3?? Jennifer Conneely - Director, Talent Solutions, Head of Customer Success EMEA & LATAM @ LinkedIn

If there's one thing we can celebrate, it's that the investment in Customer Success has never been greater. There might be debate around best practices and ensuring our actions translate into money, but according to LinkedIn's Jennifer Conneely, we've earned our seat at the table.

The only downside? We're going to have to hustle to keep it.

Jennifer's session, The major trends and emerging challenges in the European market for Customer Success, was a data-rich celebration of how far we've come and an insight into what the future for not just CSMS, but those seeking to hire them, could look like.

According to that sweet sweet LinkedIn Data, there's been a 23% increase in Customer Success roles over the last two years in Europe. In a curious twist, those who are Customer Success managers are four times more likely to have changed jobs over the past year than the entire workforce in Europe.

In and amongst all these conversations about how we can increase revenue and fight to prove our value, it's refreshing to know that customers still want deeper and more meaningful relationships, and that businesses also need to work to keep us.

For those of you who own your own businesses or lead Customer Success teams, the stats above might make you nervous. But if you're worried you won't be able to find quality CSM talent for your own teams, you needn't be.

According to Jennifer, the solution to hiring CSMs when there really aren't that many candidates and the competition is high is to think outside the box: something LinkedIn is facilitating with its new Skills Based Hiring approach. Multiple other careers foster skillsets similar to those required to succeed in Customer Success, and the new approach will allow recruiters to easily dip into pools of people on LinkedIn who have the skillsets needed (regardless of previous career path).

And while the facilitator ran out of time to answer my question (namely, uh, which careers exactly) the updated LinkedIn algorithm won't make it too hard for organizations seeking CSMs to find out.

So if we're so sought after, where does the hustling come into place?

The average life span of a skill, as it turns out, is five years. A top performer can create a 400% increase in productivity. In order to stay at the top, we therefore have to keep learning: and AI is predicted to be one of the more important skills for us to develop over the coming years.

For companies to have thriving Customer Success Teams, then, the solution isn't just developing different key performance indicators, but using a skills first approach to sourcing, and continuously developing their people.

Me? I'm signing up to an AI course ASAP.

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If you're interested in signing up to future Customer Success Network events, you can check out their website https://customersuccess.network/ , or follow them on LinkedIn.