The New Rules of Customer Success

What startups should know about creating customers for life

During each Salesforce Accelerate batch, our focused participants power through more than 50 sessions — online and in-person — learning from more than 60 speakers and advisors from within Salesforce and beyond. One of our insightful speakers is Venk Chandran, formerly a startup guy, now a Customer Success Guru at Salesforce.

The Shift

“Customer success is now the begining of every relationship we have in our business.” - Venk Chandran, Director, Product Management, Salesforce

Customer success is fundamentally transforming the way companies engage with customers. It is vital to a startup’s ability to scale as it does drive a fair bit of revenue.

Because the future of customer success is automated, we have to shift our mindset to start thinking about customer success as an integral part of our product and technology—a continuum of the customer journey.

The Perfect Success Manager (SM)

When hiring a success manager, you have to think about more than adoption. What Venk learned over the years is that it’s about more than how often your customers use the product, it’s about helping them find and maintain business value.

The SMs that do the best are the ones who master KYC—an acronym for Know Your Customer. You need someone who’s entrepreneurial, willing to build relationships with customers without being asked to, and bring thought leadership to the table to inspire customers.

From there, success for SMs lies in:

• Confidence. You’re here to help. Make it a bold statement.
• Responsiveness. The speed of response is key. Even if you don’t have the solution right away, let customers know you’re working on it.
• Transparency. Keep it real, and stay honest.

The Perfect Customer Success Help Without the Success Manager

“Customers are going to want to self-serve themselves before they reach out to a customer support agent. [..] Deliver success at scale earlier than you’d think.” –Venk Chandran, Director, Product Management, Salesforce

Think about how you can make it fast, relevant, cohesive, and personalized for customers—helping them help themselves, or other users in the community. Build self-service into your roadmap to create a seamless experience with little to no involvement from a Success Manager.

The trick is to use a sales and product mindset. Every quarter, track the efficiency of your success solutions, understand what’s working and what isn’t, and iterate.

For a deeper dive, watch his presentation:

If you’re in the Bay Area and want to learn more about Salesforce Accelerate and customer success, join us on March 27 at the Salesforce Tower. RSVP now!