
Customer Success: The Secret Growth Driver of SaaS Companies
Article Definitions:
Cx =abbreviation for Customer Success. It is also abbreviated by some as CS.
Customer = a Life Sciences (pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device) company that has a partnership with Komodo Health.
User, or End User = an individual within the customer organization that is using our SaaS platform.
First things first, let’s get one thing out of the way: Customer Success does not equate to Customer Service. In this post, I will talk about what Customer Success (Cx) is, but also what it is not — which can sometimes be an even more important distinction, and what Cx can do for a company. You may find that, while this is written from the perspective of Cx in a SaaS company, other types of organizations may benefit from adding this function as a way to fuel growth.
Today I want to focus on the purpose and responsibilities of Cx. I will not go into details around revenue and churn, as that is a topic I feel warrants a dedicated discussion. Instead, I will focus on all the underlying work that ultimately impacts the growth of the business from a Cx perspective.
What the chopsticks is Cx?
The Customer Success (Cx) function is relatively young compared to most professions that have been around since dinosaurs roamed the Earth (see: bankers). Its existence is closely tied to the emergence of the SaaS (software-as-a-service) concept somewhere between the 1960s and early 2000s, and has increasingly attracted the spotlight in the past decade.
Today we see this function sprouting across technology companies that may or may not be SaaS enterprises for its incredible potential to accelerate growth of the business. But what is interesting is that most people still have no idea what it means or does.
This is how the conversation goes when people ask me what I do for a living:
Me: “I do Customer Success for a SaaS company that specializes in the biotech industry.”
90% of people I talk to:

I attempt an explanation, and then we move onto the weather.
The Cx team wears many hats, but before get into our wardrobe situation, let’s talk about why we exist in the first place.
From a business perspective, Cx is a growth driver. We exist to ensure our customers are successful using our SaaS platform (hence the “Success” in the name), and we do this by supporting them in many different ways and providing white-glove service all throughout the engagement, so they continue renewing their subscription.
This is how I explain my role to new customers in the context of our partnership:
“Think of me as your data concierge; no ask is too small or too big.“
While the internal definition of what Cx entails will certainly vary from one company to the next, there is a case to be made for staying true to the core vision. As long as our customers are finding success using our product, they will continue to use it, and it becomes a winning cycle for both sides of the partnership. This elevated customer experience ultimately drives customer growth, and a little bit of Cx can go a long way in supporting it.
Not to be mistaken with Sales, my success as Cx is not measured on dollars won, nor do I carry any quota, rather on how much value our customers derive from their partnership with us — and they get value in many different ways, so let’s break it down.
The Many Hats of Customer Success
Customer Advocate & Connector Bolt
Cx is a customer-facing role, which means I am, to varying degrees, integrated within the customer’s own team, and I spend a lot of time thinking about their problems and how to solve them using our platform and our data. Because I am the bolt that connects the two organizations, I am hyper-focused on making sure the needs of our customers are heard and met by Komodo.
To this end, our Cx and Product teams communicate openly and frequently, so that our Product team understands what the customer priorities are at any given time. We bring Product direct feedback from the front lines and, understanding the context in which our customers would use a feature, continuously provide product design input.
Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Being that our technology is focused on the Life Sciences vertical, it is critical for our Cx team to have domain expertise, as would be the case within any other industry. This allows us to be the aforementioned connector between our tech company and our life sciences customers. We truly understand our customers because we’ve been in their shoes, solving the exact same problems in our past lives. I can honestly say our (lean) Cx team collectively has experience across every aspect and function of a Life Sciences enterprise. We’ve also directly been employed by or worked with almost all of the top 20 global biopharma companies, so that we intimately understand the inner workings of each, and this is incredibly powerful in making our partnerships as seamless as possible.
Internally, we serve as SMEs for the engineering side of our company. We educate our engineers about the life sciences industry either informally (through conversations about specific problems we are solving, sharing interesting articles and research papers) or formally (through lunch-and-learn, town halls, 1:1s, cross-function meetings).
Analyst & Consultant
Most of our team members have management consulting experience, and there is a good reason for that: we are a big data SaaS platform, and being able to analyze data and use it to solve strategic problems is a high-value add for the Komodo Cx team. I need to be able to analyze data, find solutions, and present them to leadership. As I mentioned in this article, consulting equips you with a set of tools to do just that.
Part of my consulting responsibility is to cross-pollinate ideas among our customers. Our Cx team reviews different use cases and successes from various customers at least once a week, and I am then able to share these use cases with my customers in order to push the envelope and show them new ways to get the maximum out of our data. We don’t just provide them with recommendations, however, but strive to make our data tangible and actionable, something that can be a challenge if they’ve never dealt with big data or this type of technology in the past.
Key difference from pure Consulting: My work is client-oriented, but not project-based, and this is a key distinction. Cx may support discrete projects with data we have or have not necessary productized — not all data in our stack is built into the user-facing product, and sometimes we are able to tap into these resources “offline” — but the bulk of my work is providing ongoing support through a partnership model.
Quality Check
In addition to being a Life Sciences SME, I have to understand the underlying data very, very well. And given my life sciences expertise, I need to be able to look at the data and intuitively connect it to the big picture, i.e., understand what the data tells me about the state of the market, and whether it aligns with what I already know. Before any new data is put into our product, and after it passes rigorous QA internally, Cx does one last review and gives the green light to engineering to release it to our customers.
We also get to do some bug bashing. Any new product features or major product overhauls will have some kinks (or bugs) to be worked out before they are ready for prime-time. How, you ask? Simple. Use it as we normally would. Naturally, someone in Cx will use the product differently than someone in Engineering, and since Cx can anticipate what our end users will do, it is critical we are involved with bug bashing. It can get a little competitive, too, so we have fun with it.
Training/Onboarding Support
The Cx team is the face of the partnership, and as such we drive the customer experience throughout our entire engagement: from the very beginning, when they decide to partner with us, all through onboarding them, updates to our technology, expansions to other teams/functions across the customer enterprise, and ad-hoc analyses using our data. You’ll even find our team personally handling Support emails and requests to make sure our users get lightning-fast responses to all of their questions.
We spend a lot of time ensuring our users are comfortable with our technology, as that is a key driver of their success with it. You have no use for what you don’t understand, after all.
Key difference from Customer Service: Customer Success sounds similar, so I can understand the mix up. Most people don’t even know where to start when I string a sentence together of the words SaaS platform, Customer Success, big data, and biotech. Someday I will find a simple way to explain what I do that doesn’t start with the Silicon Valley origin story, but for now let’s remember that customer service is something that Cx touches on, but that’s not even 5% of what we do. This is just that extra mile we go for our customers.
In our experience, Cx accelerates the time from launching a new customer to having users expertly use our platform in solving problems, and ultimately this leads to our customers realizing greater value and visible results in a short time. We constantly hear how they have been able to do incredible things as a result not just of our product, but of the dedicated Cx manager supporting them, and I don’t find it surprising one bit; we’ve built a world-class team with incredible talent, but more importantly, a team that has a genuine desire to see our partners be successful, and that is the core mission of Cx.
Does your company have a Cx team? How does it differ in your company or industry? Share your experiences in the comments below!
Selena is a Customer Success Manager at Komodo Health, the leading platform for modern healthcare intelligence. Prior to Komodo, Selena was a consultant at inVentiv Health Consulting (formerly Campbell Alliance), a leading consulting firm for the top global biopharma companies.
