What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is the Golden Spike
Born from the embers in your company's Sales Team and Customer Team, Customer Success is the Golden Spike that joins customers to the fullest possible scale of product usage.
It is a strategic function that ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes using a company's products or services. It is a proactive, relationship-focused method that involves helping customers effectively adopt and onboard workflows to solve their specific needs. CS drives value, improves retention, and creates upsell opportunities.
A well-organized Customer Success presence in your company offers:
- Proactive value delivery: Customer Success works to ensure customers receive value from their investment by helping them understand and integrate the offering into their business. This goes beyond tech support, which is only effective after a customer has already experienced a problem. CS gives a proactive approach of anticipating customer needs and issues through experience and education.
- Goal-oriented approach: It is focused on the customer's "why"—the specific goals they hope to achieve—and aligns the company's solution with those outcomes.
- Relationship building: Customer success is fundamentally about building and maintaining strong, long-lasting relationships with clients.
- Driving business results: By successfully guiding customers to their goals, customer success teams reduce customer churn, improve renewal rates, and create opportunities for growth through upsells and cross-sells.
- Fulfilling a promise: In a subscription-based model, customer success is responsible for delivering on the promise made during the sale by helping the customer achieve the expected solution outcomes.
LAER as a Profit Lever for EBITDA
CS runs best on LAER
The industry of CS is relatively new. Whether it lives in a company's Sales org or the Customer org, it needs constant metrics and nurturing in order to show its value. Done right, it proves its strength as a profit lever for EBITDA.
LAER is the infinity loop to success, maintaining strong relationships and loyalty. It proves CS and D-CS are profit levers for EBITDA. For a software company, specifically SaaS but also including subscriptions and perpetuals, it represents the Customer Journey stages where a company interacts with its customers and/or users.
Land: This initial phase focuses on "landing" the customer. It could imply acquiring new customers through sales and marketing efforts, but also implies returning customers who have stopped using the product for a while but then are getting back into it. Regardless, this is the welcome phase.
Adopt: This phase emphasizes ensuring customers successfully adopt and utilize the product, realizing its value, and then achieving their desired outcomes. Some call it product adoption or onboarding. Some call it the training phase. It's where customers get warmed-up to its usage and get it fully up-and-running.
Expand: This phase involves identifying opportunities to expand the customer's usage of the product. It's a bit of a misnomer, because it implies upselling or cross-selling, leading to increased revenue, but any good company knows that it also could mean down-selling to help customers use the product while spending less. To me, the goal of this place is simply to help customers find that sweet spot where they're using the product at exactly the scale they need to.
Retain (or Renew, depending on the client's business model): This final phase focuses on retaining the customer and ensuring they continue their relationship with the product.
Chris Bové - Head of Customer Success
I've spent the last several years as a results-driven head of customer success teams, leading high-performance strategy and execution in SaaS, Subscription, D2C and B2B environments. These are digital and human-first teams with proven track records in LAER-based strategy. We have driving net-new customer adoption & onboarding, expansion, and complex retention workflows through scalable success programs that highlight customer advocacy, proving that Digital CS is a profit lever for EBITDA.
Passionate about building customer-centric cultures that fuel long-term growth and loyalty. Skilled in syncing customer needs with business goals to mitigate churn, boost NRR, and enhance CLV. Cross-functional collaborator with teams in Product, Customer, and Marketing to deliver best-in-class customer/user experiences.
From scratch, building, training, and directing teams to create and maintain revenue retention, even in industries and cohorts experiencing downturn. Driving empathy-first performance models to help those teams throttle success through touchpoints driven by the customer’s actions.
Accomplishments:
- Highest NPS-scoring manager in the customer division.
- Created Digital CS workflows rescuing $1.2m from impending churn.
- Strategy change in retention campaigns increased reply-rates from 2% to 18%.
- Training of Digital CS team in new de-risk strategies increased rescue rates in 2023 from 48%-75%, and in 2024 from 75%-90%.
- Recognized by two CEOs for invaluable contributions to products and their onboarding.
