What does customer success look like at a startup?

As someone who founded and grew her customer success team at a 10 (now 25!) person startup, I get asked frequently what customer success looks like at a startup. Recently, in partnership with Totango, I hosted a webinar in front of customer success enthusiasts from all over the globe on this exact question.

While a lot of this is covered in my book, The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success, hosting this webinar allowed me to reflect a bit more on how much customer success has evolved in the past few years and where it is going.

There are so many new companies focusing on how to better streamline the customer experience and more recently — how do to so while everyone is working remote/working from home. Customers all around are now more aware of the subtleties of companies that are customer-centric and companies that are not.

It reiterates how much potential the customer success industry has, how much it has contributed already, and the exciting opportunities to unlock in the near future.

Here were some highlights from the webinar and feel free to watch the full thing here (LINK):

• Startup’s should be thinking about customer success on day zero.
• Customer success is no longer a nice to have, it’s now vital to every one of our companies. The earlier that you invest in customer success, the more dividends it will pay off in the long run. Imagine having a higher renewal rate, higher product adoption rate, and higher referral rate on day 1 → imagine the compounding returns on that in a year, 2 years, or 5! This is some incredible stuff.
• The success of customer success requires deliberate, smart, and strategic thinking for companies to execute and reap the benefits. Customers are more discerning now, so the bar has been raised for everyone — even for those companies who are just months old.
• After hundreds of conversations over these past few years, what I’ve realized is that regardless if you are just starting your customer success function today or are 3 years into your customer success career at a startup, the key to success is focus.
• Focus on three main things: 1) Understanding your charter, 2) Championing the customer, and 3) Architecting a complete customer experience
• There are three main mistakes that startup’s make when creating a customer success team: 1) Not thinking about customer success on day zero, 2) Thinking about it once and not thinking about it again, and 3) Getting tired of beating the customer drum
• Scaling a customer success team at a startup is about embracing a “Fail Fast, Learn Faster” mentality and supercharging your team with technology

Want to nerd out about customer success or want to talk about what customer success looks like your startup? Feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-chiang/