Why customer success?

If you are in any way associated with the tech field, odds are that you’ve heard the term customer success tossed around. It’s been a big buzz word for the last couple of years, and it’s something that you should probably know about. But ask 10 different companies what Customer Success means to them, and you may get 10 different answers. That’s because the way Customer Success is practiced varies widely across different verticals and companies. There are, however,  some core fundamentals of this department that are present in any self-respecting team, and that’s what we’ll cover today. 

Where did it come from?

As you’ll later learn, the objectives and results of a great Customer Success organization can be relevant to any field of business, but you’ll most often hear it associated with SaaS companies. That’s because many SaaS companies pay a high customer acquisition cost, banking on the fact that they’ll be able to not only keep their customers long term, but to also expand their business with current customers. And that’s really where Success teams shine - they are tasked with managing long term relationships with existing clients, driving product adoption, decreasing time to value, and, ultimately, driving retention. 

So, how do they do it? There are a few keys to a success team being able to carry out their responsibilities, and they largely center around understanding your customer. First, you should know why a customer is purchasing your product, and what key objectives would provide the most value to them. This knowledge allows CSM’s to ensure that customers realize that value as quickly as possible (usually during the onboarding phase). Once the customer has actualized their original objectives, they should then have regular touch points with your success team (based on tier), the derive additional value. These touchpoints center around training opportunities (gleaned from in-depth usage statistics), unveiling new products/features, keeping tabs on your customers shifting business needs, and, in many cases, renewals. We’ll take a deeper dive into each of these topics in other articles, but this should give you a general idea of how modern CS teams perform. 

To recap, Customer Success is designed to increase client value, thus increasing client retention and advocacy. This helps to not only grow your current accounts, but leads to an increased number of referrals, and can even help shape future releases!