What’s all the fuss about the Customer Success profession?
Daniel Farkas- President, Global Renewals and EMEA Customer Success at Box
Customer Success is a fairly new phenomenon but it’s also a powerful way to pursue long-term engagement and success. What do we mean when we talk about Customer Success? What are the key performance indicators that denote success? And what challenges remain? For me, Customer Success is about the buyer and seller working closely together to establish how services are being consumed and how they could be better deployed.
Today, every start-up in the cloud space needs to think about Customer Success initiatives. They tend to do this initially by recruiting sales and marketing to help Customer Success Managers (CSMs) talk to customers and see what is working well for them and not so well.
In the early stages at least, CSMs tend to operate as hybrids of account managers and technical support agents, occupying a grey area where they spend as much time collecting and dispensing trouble tickets as finding out what the supplier could do to make the customer’s life better.
Nobody would want to be a CSM if that were the top and bottom of the role, but thankfully the next stages are more fun. That next stage is really about listening, insight and analytics — and probably in that order. Getting to the roots of Customer Success involves getting the customer to talk about what’s happening at their organisations and what the supplier is doing to help them reach their goals. Here, the numbers start to become useful. Seats deployed is obviously a big one but then so is usage and satisfaction. If the user licence is activated but the user isn’t actively using the software then sooner or later the IT function or line of business is going to notice and switch it off or take some other action. On the other hand, an intensively used service where users are exploring many features is wonderfully affirmative. Spotting anomalies such as groups that were using features and then stopped can help create a granular understanding of issues that are blockers to delivering value.
Over time, it’s likely that the CSM will strike up fairly tight relationships with admins and maybe even line-of-business heads. But there can be a ‘glass ceiling’ effect where the CSM function is running on a hamster wheel of quarterly ‘business’ reviews that are really quarterly technical reviews because the scope of those meetings can be confined to what features are being used, by how many people and how often.
The ultimate goal for a customer success manager must be to engage at a deeper level and that involves going back to the big, existential questions. Why did the customer buy the product or service in the first place? Answer that and you have a far better ability to see why more seats are not being added or certain features are underused. The answers to the ‘why?’ question could be wide and varied from ‘to launch new products faster’ or ‘to get international teams working together’. It could be about improved customer service or sparking creativity and innovation because the company is being outgunned by start-ups or more innovative companies.
That key ‘why?’ question must always be front and centre. The successful CSM will attempt to delve into those reasons for deploying and honestly gauge the extent to which the supplier has helped deliver on the customer’s ambitions. The numbers don’t lie and an open and frank discussion creates a win-win scenario where trust is built up over time and where the vendor is delivering a holistic service rather than just selling a product in the old ‘hit and run’ fashion.
It’s probably no coincidence that the numbers of Customer Success roles being created have swollen in line with cloud and the ‘as a service’ movement. Where once it was hard to find satisfied enterprise software customers, today there are more ‘happy’ stories because cloud companies cannot be successful if customers are not happy. The nasty phenomenon of customers being ‘locked in’ to providers goes away to be replaced by a mutually dependent relationship that can always end sharply if customers are discontent. Cloud provides valuable transparency into usage patterns that was never available to the developers of traditional software where it was difficult to know who was using what… use that power.
I’m sure that in some vendors there’s sometimes a temptation to look at carefully selected KPIs and ask leading questions but if that ever works in the supplier’s favour it’s a short-term gain that’s likely to lead to long-term pain. Sometimes, the business can be struggling but all the lights are green. The guilty will get found out eventually.
But generally, Customer Success is changing quickly and at its best drives a far more fruitful and satisfying relationship than that usually exists between IT supplier and customer. Successful technology companies will have to work hard on maintaining tight bonds with customers and go deep to understand what is going on in interactions with their technologies. The future will be about outcome metrics and real business outcomes. It will be about closely correlating what is happening at the macro level of business and how technology is being used, rather than just blunt comparisons of adoption and deployment. Whisper it for now, but maybe the technology industry is actually maturing.
