What is Customer Success?
CS is the Golden Spike that gets customers to their happiest state using your products. It is a proactive, relationship-focused method that involves helping customers effectively adopt and onboard workflows to solve their specific needs.
Having emerged only in the early 2000s, CS as an industry is still relatively new. Today, it is a well-employed strategy. It drives value, improves retention, and creates upsell opportunities. It helps both parties achieve their expectations.
A well-organized Customer Success ecosystem 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 is a Customer Success profit lever
LAER is the infinity loop to success, maintaining strong relationships and loyalty.
Whether CS 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, even for companies tracking their earnings through EBITDA.
CS also represents the Customer Journey stages where a company interacts with its customers and/or users.
LAER - a traditional model: how to engage customers
"L" = Land
(blue = a sea of customers)
Focuses on landing the customer into the company's client list. This can be through all paid tiers, but also trial and freeware.
Stage 1: Awareness
Stage 2: Consideration
Stage 3: Acquisition
"A" = Adopt
(orange = warming up to us)
Ensures customers successfully adopt and utilize the product, realizing its value, and achieve desired outcomes.
Stage 4: Initial Onboarding
Stage 5: Guided Onboarding
Stage 6: Survey Capture
"E" = Expand
(gold = golden opportunities)
Right-setting the customer's usage of the product. This can be upselling or down-selling. The goal is to help customers get to the exact usage/scale they need.
Stage 7: Roadmap this term
Stage 8: The P.O.W.S. Method
"R" = Retain (or Renew)
(green = the almighty dollar)
Retain the relationship with the customer. Renewals are part of this, but not the only part.
Stage 9: Loyalty consideration
Stage 10: Roadmap next term
Stage 11: Final expansions
Stage 12: Renew >> infinity loop
Further reading: CS definitions...
As an industry, CS is roughly 20 years old. So it's always fun to see a job posting that's demanding someone with 15+ years of experience in it. There are also nuances that are only being realized within the last few years. For example, while most CS teams live inside of a company's Sales organization, some CS teams live in the Customer Team. There are plusses and minuses to this, and being purposeful in knowing where YOUR company should place it is essential.
So, if you're looking to expand your company into the realm of Customer Success, Following are some examples of how the industry's thought leadership is defining the direction...
Gainsight
Customer Success (CS) is a business method that uses your product or service to help customers achieve their objectives. It’s relationship-focused client management that aligns your customer with your company’s goals—igniting beneficial outcomes for everyone involved. Ultimately, effective Customer Success strategies reduce customer churn, lower acquisition costs, and create more upsell opportunities.
As competition increases and more and more companies rely on recurring revenue models, Customer Success has become a massive growth engine. According to the Customer Success Index 2023, 92% of companies are maintaining or increasing their investment in CS, despite difficult economic conditions.
TSIA
Customer success is the strategic practice of ensuring customers achieve their desired business outcomes by using a company's products or services. It is a proactive function focused on building long-term relationships by making sure customers realize the full value of their investment, which in turn leads to benefits like improved retention, reduced churn, and opportunities for upsell and expansion.
Zendesk
Customer success is the motion that should result in your customers loving your solution so much that they want to continue purchasing your products or services in the long term. It’s all about building strong relationships and understanding customers’ goals. Customer success is where each customer interaction offers opportunities for deeper and more meaningful engagement.
To achieve customer success, your customer success managers and their teams should proactively connect with your customers throughout their lifecycle with your company.
Why it is important:
To put it simply: Customer success helps companies unlock the value from their solutions and achieve a compelling ROI as a result. When customer success teams help buyers accomplish their goals, it’s clear that the product or service provides value for users. As a result, it:
- Strengthens the relationship
- Builds trust
- Leads to higher satisfaction
Customer success interactions also allow companies to collect valuable customer insights that could benefit the entire organization: product, marketing, sales, and more. The more teams learn about their clients and their needs, the better they’re able to deliver quality experiences and create a healthier customer lifecycle.
Your business success is tied to your customers—through sales, revenue, and retention. Happy, loyal buyers often become brand advocates and rave about your company through product reviews, social media posts, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
Salesforce
Customer success ensures customers get the most out of a product or service through ongoing support, education, and engagement. The main goals are to drive retention by demonstrating value, reduce churn by proactively addressing issues, and increase sales by highlighting additional offerings. By following this formula, customer success can foster long-term customer satisfaction and sustainable business growth.
Customer success is more than just a business function; it is a strategic initiative to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a product or service. In today’s competitive small and midsize business (SMB) environment, prioritizing customer success helps build loyalty, reduce churn, and eventually achieve top revenue growth.
Unlike customer support, which reacts to issues as they arise, customer success takes a proactive approach. Businesses can create long-term, mutually beneficial relationships by anticipating customer needs and guiding them toward success. In this article, we’ll explore the key principles of customer success, why it matters, and how to implement an effective strategy.
Why Customer Success Matters:
Businesses that prioritize customer success gain significant advantages. Higher retention rates stem from customers consistently experiencing value, leading to continued product usage. Additionally, increased customer lifetime value (CLTV) means satisfied customers spend more and are less likely to switch to competitors. Stronger brand loyalty develops as successful customers become advocates, driving organic growth through word-of-mouth marketing.
Customer success also directly impacts reputation. For businesses of any size actively investing in customer relationships establishes trust, reliability, and customer satisfaction. By integrating small business marketing software strategies and leveraging market research, SMBs can strengthen loyalty and build long-term revenue growth.
and just for fun... Wikipedia
Customer success is defined as the business methodology that ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a company's products or services. The approach is built on several core principles:
Proactive engagement: Customer success teams identify potential issues and opportunities before they impact the customer relationship. This contrasts with reactive customer service models that address problems after they occur.
Outcome-focused approach: Rather than focusing solely on product usage, customer success emphasizes helping customers achieve their business objectives. This alignment creates stronger customer relationships and increases the likelihood of contract renewals and expansions.
Data-driven decision making: Customer success relies heavily on customer data, usage analytics, and health scoring to identify at-risk accounts and expansion opportunities. This quantitative approach enables scalable customer management across large customer bases.