Why Customer Success is Every Department’s Responsibility

As a Chief Product Officer, I've had the privilege of witnessing the transformative power of Customer Success (CS) within the B2B SaaS enterprise software landscape. CS isn't just a department—it's a company-wide philosophy that ensures our customers achieve their desired outcomes while using our product, leading to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue growth .

In an organization, every department has a role to play in customer success. Product Managers (PMs), for instance, should work closely with Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Technical Account Managers (TAMs). While CSMs focus on understanding the customer's business goals and fostering a strong relationship for long-term business growth, TAMs concentrate on product implementation, troubleshooting, and technical support. This collaboration feeds and contributed towards the importance of picking the right feature prioritization framework , a topic I've previously discussed.

As part of the prioritization framework which Product management owns, PMs plays a vital role in supporting CSMs by presenting roadmaps, gathering requirements, and ensuring that the product evolves to meet the needs of customers, often during Quarterly Business Reciews (QBRs). This collaboration is can also help in building a thriving ecosystem , which can help CSMs with expanded use cases to help reduce churn, and in fact expand through cross-selling and up-selling.

When Sales is able to sell premium, concierge-like support, Customer Success benefits, because CSMs often find themselves consumed with helping log and advocating for product bugs that impact customer's goals to be addressed asap. This premium service often includes funded personalized assistance, faster response times, and dedicated support personnel that frees CSMs to focus on solving the latest customer business problems, leading to possible expansion. It's a strategy that aligns with my belief in achieving product-market fit, again and again .

Product Advisory Boards (PABs) and partner solutions also play a significant role in enhancing customer success. PABs provide valuable insights to CSMs, while partner solutions increase the value across the enterprise via integration of functionality and data sets. These strategies align with my views on growing your B2B startup with a success North Star .

Marketing has a large vested interest in partnering with Customer Success because they need case studies, and success stories. Often product marketing working with CSMs can help the customer craft a compelling narrative around the value realized, which the customer can first use to show the ROI internally. But later can be used to present at user events, then industry conferences. Ultimately winning awards in an ideal scenario, but at minimum acting as the pipeline for public customer references. On the topic of references, who do you think should own the management of the classification, frequency and rewards/compensation to customers that help sales as references during deals? That’s something that many companies have trouble with, and a topic of one of my future articles.

Finance and Operations teams measure the success of our customer success programs through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Churn Rate, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Retention Rate, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Average Time on Platform. These metrics help the company thrive during economic downturns , and help CSMs understand where they are relative to their goals that contribute to the company targets.

CSMs face several challenges, including product expertise, understanding customers, dealing with unhappy paths, and prioritizing tasks. They often have to handle support issues, which can be time-consuming and detract from their primary role of ensuring customer success. It's a challenge that requires tidying up our organizational rules to make sure Product Management, UX, Documentation, Engineering, QA and Support all are aligned and understand customer needs and pains.

"The biggest barrier to customer success is CEOs not making it an important part of the culture." - Nick Mehta , CEO of Gainsight

Finally, IT can utilize a variety of tools and applications to assist CSMs in their roles. These include Zendesk for customer service, ChurnZero and Gainsight for customer success management, Intercom for customer messaging, and HubSpot Service Hub for an all-in-one customer service platform.

The role of customer success in B2B SaaS enterprise software is multifaceted, encompassing customer relationship management, technical support, product development input, and more. It's a critical function that directly impacts customer satisfaction, retention, and company revenue, and it's a responsibility that every department shares.