What Is Customer Success?

Excerpt from The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success

Customer success can help streamline experiences, grow product engagement and loyalty. That’s why companies are thinking up ways to create an exceptional customer experience. Building relationships with customers, inevitably, creates brand loyalty and customers are always willing to come back for a better customer experience then the last.

In this week’s blog, I will be discussing why customers are willing to pay more for better customer experiences. Here’s an excerpt from my book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success.

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Customers no longer just buy things, they require an experience. A 2013 study by Walker found that 86% of buyers would choose a better customer experience, even if it meant paying a bit more.

That same study also forecasted that by 2020 customer experience will surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator. Not surprisingly with findings like this, 89% of companies, according to a 2014 Gartner study, reported that they expected to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience going forward.

What does Customer Experience mean? It means that nowadays customers are expecting:

1. Flawless onboarding: Customers want to get started at their pace and on their signal.

2. Quick signal of a positive and non-trivial return on investment: Customers want to know early on that the product is worth their time in the long run.

3. Easy-to-find and easy-to-understand help when they need it: If customers have any problems, they want an easy answer right then and there.

4. A top of the line customer service experience: If customers need any additional assistance, it should be seamless and flawless. They should be treated as if they are royalty.

However, all of this takes years for even the most successful and straightforward companies to develop; this is where customer success can come in to fill the gap.

Five years ago, companies could just focus primarily on customer experience — what customers see and feel and the user interface that they experience. Now, things are moving quickly and more companies are adopting customer success or customer-success-like functions into their companies to not only optimize customer experience, but also to make sure that customers are reaching their goals.

Previously, a good customer experience didn’t necessarily have to align with customer goals, but with customer success, helping customers succeed is the centerpiece.

What Does Customer Success Mean to you? Let’s discuss it on Medium!

Do you agree that customers no longer want to buy things, but require a better experience? Are you one of these customers who is willing to pay a bit more for a better customer experience?

Let me know your thoughts by posting your comments below!

Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from my book, The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success in this blog series.

My new book The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success is officially available on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Startups-Guide-Customer-Success-Champion/dp/1641371889

If you’d like to get in contact with me on social media and learn more, message me on LinkedIn.