Notes on Customer Success for Philippine Startups
Published in
4 min readNov 7, 2016
I’m aiming to master of customer success. Customer lifetime is critical for recurring revenue businesses. And customer success is the key driver for the duration of customer lifetime.
These are notes on from Lincoln Murphy’s guide to Customer Success.
I’m also reaching out to StartupPH and add Philippine-specific lessons to these notes.
Personally, my goal is to have concrete changes in our operations which would incorporate customer success in our company DNA.
Notes from Lincoln Murphy’s Guide
- Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.
- Customer Success Management is the proactive orchestration of the customer’s journey toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome.
- Examples of proactive orchestration: training, professional services, high-touch onboarding, self-service onboarding, in-app cues, email follow-up sequences, or training to bridge success gaps
- How to develop a Customer Success Strategy: 1) identify desired outcomes for each customer segment. 2) identify what they can do on their own, what you can be paid to do, and success gaps. 3) create a time- data- or event-based action plan.
- Technology enables strategy; doesn’t define it.
- Customer Success is NOT about Customer Happiness (loyal customers can be the most demanding)
- Customer Success isn’t about saving customers who are about to churn; it’s about not letting customers get to that point in the first place.
- Usual catalysts for thinking about customer success: churn, Customer Lifetime extension, Account Expansion, and / or Customer Advocacy
- Customer Success as a Purpose: if your purpose as a company is the success of your customers, and that’s what you operationalize and optimize around, the sky’s the limit.
- Everyone is in Customer Success. A great question to ask everyone in the company is “how do you contribute to the Desired Outcome of our customers?”
- Signals: usage, support tickets, interactions with self-service help, training consumption, they buy consulting / pro services, they take upsell / expansion offers, they give testimonials or act as references or offer case studies, are they paying their bills?, changes to internal champion status, opt-outs to marketing communications
- Customer support is key but customer success is a wider concept
- Customer Success as a core tenet of the organization must be implemented in a way that is positive for both the customer and the company. You have to hold your customers accountable.
- Customer success in Customer Development: Success starts with acquiring the right customers, and that starts with Customer Development.
- In Customer Acquisition: Customer Success starts with acquiring the right customers!
- In Sales Process Engagement: training them in their part of success should start with sales, as well as training them to appreciate the value we give
- In Metering / Billing / Payment Process: match you billing with their preferred payment process
- In Customer and User Onboarding: again, customers should be trained in their part of making this engagement a success
- In Initial Engagement (Activation): in the first 90 days, work on time to first value
- In Functional Support: be proactive in helping in usage
- In Technical Support: use support transaction data to be proactive. Prioritize based on value and churn risk.
- In Customer Feedback Loop: use insights of customer success managers to improve the company
- In Ongoing Engagement: your customers definition of success changes over time. Adapt.
- In Customer-Driven Growth: be systematic in getting testimonials and referrals. It is a sign of a successful customer
- In Customer Intelligence: use technology to see if they are testing competition way before they churn
- In Customer Expansion: create increasing amounts of value over time and increase revenue (not sure if sales or customer success should own the upselling)
- In Customer Renewal: should be a non-event
- In Customer Retention: simply an effect of Customer Success
- In Post Churn Follow-up: after a cooling off period, call and learn
Are you a B2B startup in the Philippines with recurring revenue? Let’s exchange notes!
Reply to this article or contact me at kahlil+cs@corazo.org or 0917-721-6516. I’ll add my notes from our conversation here so we could start building a rich Philippine-specific playbook for customer success.
What are your take-aways? Here are mine. Some concrete next steps:
- Map out customer journey (from marketing to sales to 1st 3 months) and add actions to prepare for success
- Training for success in our trial period (how to measure this?)
- Process to enable appreciation of value after subscription (report? ROI computation?)
- After becoming a customer, training in areas that customers own
- Schedule customer visits (perhaps every 6 months?), perhaps give some sort of training related to their success?
