Customer success

Customer success, also known as customer success management or client advocacy, is a business strategy focused on helping customers achieve their goals when using a product or service. It involves providing support and guidance to ensure customers get value from their investments. This approach aims to reduce customer churn and create opportunities for additional sales. As a specialized form of customer relationship management, customer success management focuses on implementing strategies that result in reduced customer churn and increased up-sell opportunities.

The main objective of customer success is to ensure that customers meet their goals, which can lead to higher customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company. It has become an important aspect of many businesses, with teams and tools created to support this effort

Customer success managers

Presently, the customer success function within most organizations is embodied in the customer success manager (CSM), client relationship manager (CRM), or client strategy consultant (CSC) job titles.

Customer success managers (CSM) act as the main point of contact and as trusted advisors for the customer from the vendor side as they are the ones ultimately responsible and accountable for that customer's success. The function may share many of the same functions of traditional account managers, relationship managers, project managers, and technical account managers, but their mode of operations tend to be much more focused on long-term value-generation to the customer. At its heart, it is about maximizing the value the customer generates from utilizing the solutions of the vendor, while enabling the vendor the ability to derive high return from the customer value. To enable that, the CSM must monitor the customer's usage of and satisfaction from the solutions of the vendor, identify opportunities and challenges from the way the customer engages with the solution and take action to help resolve challenges and foster expansion of the usage as well as the value from the solutions (to both sides) over time.

As a consequence, relentlessly monitoring and managing the customer health is a key success factor for every CSM as well as the need to deeply understand the drivers of value the customer gains from the solutions provided by the vendor. Without such deep and timely understanding of these two aspects of the customer, the CSM would not be able to act effectively.

In young organizations where the total number of employees (and customers) is small, the CSM may be the first employee of the customer success team. As such, they will be responsible for most of the functions described above, which over time may be fulfilled by more specialized team members. Ownership of commercial responsibilities by CSM vary among companies. While some believe a CSM's neutrality from sales or commercial conversations may make a customer more likely to respond to and engage with a CSM, others view the ownership of the commercial relations as natural to a long-term relationship between a vendor and a customer and more empowering to the CSM.

For CSMs to fulfill the responsibilities of their role, they must be empowered by an organization's executive team to navigate freely among all parts of an organization. This maintains the CSMs' credibility with the customer as an effective resource. In organizations where CSMs are just another level of abstraction or a "screen" between the customer and the resources they need, the credibility of the CSM is compromised and the customer experience eroded which may result in a customer not renewing or expanding their business with the vendor. Furthermore, lacking the top-down support will deprive the CSM of the ability to garner the right resources needed by them to complete their jobs.

Background and history

Every company that sells products or services to customers has functions responsible for managing customer fulfillment and relations. In traditional businesses, these functions are most commonly referred to as "fulfillment", "post sales", or "professional services".

In the technology sector, companies have been developing, selling, and enabling software solutions for many years. At most of these companies, the function responsible for managing customer relations was often called "account management", "operations", or "services".

As the business world evolves into new fields, the method of delivering software to customers changes as well. One of the most significant changes in recent years has been the emergence of software as a service (SaaS).

SaaS is a subscription-based method of delivering software solutions, moving away from the "old" model of granting a perpetual license that allowed customers to own the solution and use it as they saw fit, while being responsible for its operation. With SaaS, companies offer their products as services instead of physical objects, transitioning the economy to a subscription model. Customers "rent" the solution for a specified period and the vendor provides not only the solution itself but also the supporting infrastructure.

This new model represents a fundamental shift in the engagement between software vendors and their customers. In the traditional "enterprise software" model, customers buy a license for the software and pay the vendor upfront, regardless of actual usage. In the SaaS model, customers pay a (much smaller) recurring fee for the software. Consequently, the software vendor must ensure that the customer is using the solution and seeing value from it to continue receiving payments. This shift in the software industry's operating model highlighted the need for a dedicated function within the company to ensure the success of its customers.

This emerging function is now referred to as customer success (CS).

Although the trend towards SaaS has been ongoing since the beginning of the 21st century, the understanding of the need for much stronger focus on customer success and therefore the creation of the field of customer success only began around 2010–2012.

The CS function is responsible for retaining and growing the business that the sales team has secured. Case studies show that companies with strong CS teams outperform peers with weak or no CS teams in a multitude of financial criteria including customer retention (also measured by "churn", which is the opposite of retention), revenue growth rates, gross margin, customer satisfaction, and referrals. In fact, customer experience is the greatest untapped source of both decreased costs and increased revenue in most industries, but only if companies take the time to understand what underpins it and how they can benefit financially from improving it.