Why Customer Success Role Is The Growth Engine ⚙️ for Business Process as a Service or Outcome-Based Business Models ✌🏽

So here we are, I’m writing about something combining my experiences from supporting global customer situations from deals, critical customer situations to ensuring outcomes and my passion for Business Process as a Service.

What is Customer Success?

The best definition I actually found is from Gainsight:

Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. Effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities.

You see the role focuses really on the outcomes the customer should or wants to achieve with your product. Through my experience, do the customer success managers get incentivized on the successful adoption of products and services as well the overall NPS for the customer.

The role greatly differs from “pure” account management which often gets incentivized on the revenues/bookings. Still, even for the well-known account management methodology, I see shifts in companies to adopt outcome-based incentivization like adoption which is crucial for the cloud world.

A great sales rep can listen to the customer and discover the pain points which need to get solved and create urgency in showcasing what will happen if the pain does not get solved. The best, and always needed in the B2B case is that the rep then builds cases with metrics that solve the pain point and close the deal. The customer success manager now ensures that the case can be delivered and maybe even improved. He steps in after the deal was signed and the product implemented.

Why is it so important for outcome-based business models like BPaaS?

Business-Process-as-a-Service aligns the customer need of a standardized commodity process like accounting and offers just the process with the liked outcome e.g. quarter-end closing.

The customer success manager focuses exactly on this. In our example, the quarter-end closing; Quarter-end closing is a commodity process because it does not defer from the company and it’s highly audited and standardized. The pure objective is to drive this process as efficiently and satisfying for the customer as possible to co-create the value.

Co-creation is a very important term for the BPaaS model. It means that the customer as well has to interact with the service, to Co-create the value with the vendor. It’s not a leaning back. The co-creation gets ensured through the customer success manager.

SaaS is already focusing on Customer Success, how could it even improve for BPaaS?

Software-as-a-Service was the business model which accelerated the development for the customer success manager. Why could it even improve with BPaaS? SaaS can still create money in “selling” software, the customer does not necessarily get the wanted outcomes. With BPaaS you will only make money when you “deliver” the outcome. If the outcome is not delivered the customer does not have to pay. This puts the customer

Summary:

• The customer success manager focuses on business outcomes and adoption of their clients
• This role is the perfect fit for outcome-based business models that only prosper with continuous customer satisfaction and delivery of outcomes.

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