The Role of Focus in Customer Success

When I was just starting out and trying to figure out how to best create and establish customer success at my company, I remember thinking:

“The product that I’m working with isn’t some huge software platform meant to be used by thousands of employees; it’s actually the complete opposite. It’s an app where one student has one account and that’s it. However, I hear — particularly when it comes to direct to consumer businesses — that tech-touch, aka pure automation, is the way to go for a company like mine because a customer success team just simply wouldn’t have enough bandwidth — time, resources, or manpower — to cover all of the accounts and still justify the cost of having a customer success team.”

“However, the product that I work with is also very emotion-based. After all, we’re dealing with children’s education here! Automation isn’t something that can replace human touch, but we only had one person. Therefore, it is difficult to staff one customer success person to so many accounts and still make sure that each account is getting the attention that it needs. Does this mean that customer success isn’t something for my company at all? How exactly would it work here?”

The answer — it’s all about focus.

At the beginning, there is no way one can start out in customer success and absorb all of the information — the best practices on how to run a quarterly business review, how to implement in-app NPS surveys with intricate logic, or even the basics of mapping the customer journey. There’s too much to learn and handle all at once and you don’t want to burn out.

So, focus.

Understand how your product is seen through your customers’ eyes, and then understand where the customer is coming from emotionally. Once you truly understand that, not only will you be able to better and more intelligently prioritize which resources to sort through, but you will also be able to make more informed strategic decisions as you learn more about the customer success industry.

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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 :)