Customer Success as a Mindset
Five years ago, companies could just focus primarily on customer experience — what customers see and feel and the user interface that they experience.
In 2018, what makes the difference now is not whether you have a customer success function, but rather how much you enable your customer success function to flourish within the company.
To flourish, customer success must become the company mindset to unlock the biggest opportunity in business.
Because customer success comes into play toward the end of the revenue funnel, when some cash and investment from the clients are already in, companies — particularly startups — sometimes push it off as second priority.
This is absolutely incorrect. If customer success is secondary, then you’ve placed the customer as secondary and customers will realize that quickly.
To achieve this, customer success needs to exceed expectations in all three foci — external, internal, and multiplicative.
Customer success’s focus externally is to create champions of both the product and brand. To create a champion of a product, customer success must help the customer maximize their return on investment. To create a champion of a brand, customer success must create an emotional experience branded through stellar customer experience and customer service.
Customer success’s focus internally is to establish and empower a customer-centric mindset within the company. To establish this mindset, customer success needs to beat the drum around customer centricity to prove value. To empower this mindset, customer success needs to provide continuous feedback (which includes creating a good relationship between the company and clients to get constructive, continuous feedback) to enable other verticals to be customer focused.
If done correctly, customer success can then oil a good machine and have multiplier effects for every department within the company. Marketing will have testimonials, good content, and a deeper understanding of customers. Sales will have more sales because of a better brand and more referrals. The product, engineering, and operations teams will better understand customer needs and requests. Furthermore, customer success can spearhead improvements in overall company morale and team synergy.
If this all sounds exciting to you and you want to make your customer success team flourish at your company, then you are in the right place.
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The above was an excerpt from my new book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, available now on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Guide-Customer-Success-Champion/dp/1641371889
I hope to help push the conversation around what customer centricity means for our businesses. No more talk — we need action!
If you’d like to get in contact with me on social media and learn more, feel free to message me on LinkedIn. Always down to nerd out about customer success :)
