Customer Success — a primer
Why helping your customers to make themselves successful is more important than ever
The discipline of customer success is becoming key to customer retention and revenue generation in the software as a service market. It’s an area I’m very passionate about and so, having been inspired by some recent articles (this and this specifically) I wanted to share some views and experiences.
The Customer Success team at Yammer implements this discipline in a very specific way, focusing on inspiring our customers to think differently and then connecting them to people and tools that would make it happen by working openly as part of a network. We’ll share more on this over the coming weeks.
Whether you are running, building or a part of a Customer Success organization this article is relevant to you. Even if you’re approaching this a customer of a service, this should still be helpful to you. If it’s not, let me know and I will make it so.
If you’re in the business of making your customers successful, I hope this article is useful to you. I’d love to hear your approaches and views. If you’re a customer of a service (which I’m sure you are), I’d be very interested in how you’d expect organizations to help you be successful with it.
Why should I care about the success of my customers?
This should be obvious, but if your customers are not successful with your service, they’re not going to recommend you to others, buy more things from you or continue using it themselves. Three key trends mean that this is now more important than ever:
- Subscription: In the age of everything-as-a-service, recurring use is critical. Customers who are not getting value don’t renew, therefore you get less money.
- Disruption: There’s now less to stop other people from doing what you’re doing. There’s the theoretical value you provide to your customers through your service (what it promises them on the packet) and the value customers are actually getting from it. The second one is what drives stickiness and so there’s an imperative to help customers get there.
- Connection: Your customers are now far more connected than they ever were before and are willing to voice their opinions. If you think success is viral in this environment, try having customers that fail.
The enterprise software market has been heavily affected by these trends. Historically it has relied on major, up front purchases, for technology decisions that will automatically stick for a number of years. As enterprise software continues its march into the cloud and use of software as a service increases, this pattern is becoming less common and a corresponding rise in the need to focus on helping customers be successful.
What is “customer success”?
Customer success is the discipline through which customers are helped to achieve the outcome that your service promises.
Focusing on the outcome rather than the features of the service helps differentiate between what your service is and what your service is for. It also helps differentiate between buying, deploying, using and getting value from the service.
A successful outcome will be defined differently depending on the service. A simple way to do this is to consider what should have changed for the customer a set amount of time (3 months, 6 months, 1 year) after purchase. Some examples of this could be:
- Greater ability to make business decisions through better understanding of data
- Happier employees as a result of having access to more flexible perks
- Higher sales because of a better understanding of the prospective customer base
For my current organization, it’s that a customer is demonstrably more responsive and adaptable as a result of being able to operate as a network (see www.theresponsiveorg.com for more).
Note that in the world of enterprise software, having a conversation about what your service is for generally necessitates talking to people other than IT, unless your product is for IT.
Aren't I doing this already?
When you look at the definition, your first reaction might be to think that everyone in your organization is doing this already. After all, you set yourselves up to with the customer in mind, didn't you? But collective responsibility is often the same thing as no responsibility. If you look closely at your organization, particularly those in the field, you might, for example, find that:
- Sales people are winning new business
- Account Managers are building relationships and managing by exception
- Professional services teams are limited by the scope of their deployment contracts
- Support fix things when they go wrong
People that are great at their roles will often incorporate aspects of the customer success discipline into what they do, but it’s not likely to be their core focus. This can create blind spots, which will lead to problems.
Sounds great? How do I go about doing it?
Customer Success is a discipline that has a few different dimensions to it, which I’ve explored further in this article.
