What is Customer Success?
Customer Success is the Golden Spike that joins customers to their fullest possible state & scale of product usage.
Having emerged only in the early 2000s, CS as an industry is still relatively new. Remember perpetual licenses and dongles? Remember going into a store and buying software in a box? All those large license fees were paid upfront, and actual usage data or satisfaction tracking was nonexistent. The SaaS model's recurring revenue structure created two things:
- For their staff, fair ages for fair work
- For their customers, a direct link between CSAT and business success.
Today, CS is a well-employed strategic function. 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. In short, it helps both parties achieve their expectations.
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 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 - Traditional model of engaging customers
"L" = Land
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
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
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)
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
Chris Bové - Head of Customer Success
Having spent the last several years as a results-driven head of Customer Success teams, I've led high-performance strategy and execution in SaaS, Subscription, D2C and B2B environments.
These digital and human-first CS teams have a proven track record in LAER 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, even for companies who track financials using for EBITDA.
Customer-Centric Culture
Being passionate about fueling long-term growth and loyalty only goes so far. It's not until the culture in a company changes will CS truly shine. The first step in this direction is to get skilled in syncing customer needs with business goals. This mitigates churn, boosts NRR, and enhances CLV.
- Construct the best possible ecosystem for this to thrive
- Create cross-functional agendas with teams in Product, Customer, and Marketing to deliver best-in-class customer/user experiences.
- From scratch, build, train, and direct teams to create and maintain revenue retention, even in industries and cohorts experiencing downturn.
- Drive empathy-first performance models to help those teams throttle success through touch points 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.
Driving outcomes in Digital Customer Success Management
Chris Bové strategized and led a new Digital CS Team with great success, and all during a transition from public to private ownership (private equity). Scroll below for the details.