Customer Success

Customer Success is the function at a company responsible for managing the technical and business relationships between a vendor and its customers with the intent of: (1) maximizing the value that customers generate from the solutions they acquired from the vendor by making them as profitable and productive as possible, and (2) maximizing the value the vendor can in turn derive from the customers resulting in sustainable corporate profits. and growth.

Customer Success is an emerging but critical role in a company's success. The function is most commonly used in the software world and most prevalent among software as a service (SaaS) companies. Because Customer Success is a nascent, fast-emerging field of business, its organizational alignment and activities are still evolving. There is still a large amount of variance with respect to its scope of responsibilities, reporting structure, terminology used for describing its activities, metrics used for measuring its performance and more. While deviations exist in the specifics of the function, it always refers to the management of the relations between the vendor and the customers after the initial sale. However, successful companies do not only reorganize their teams between the pre and post sale, and rename the post-sale team Customer Success, but also instill a culture of customer centricity in decision making and goals.

In fact, the explosive growth of the SaaS economy, fuels an increase not only in the importance of the Customer Success function, but also in the scope of its appeal and relevance in the industry. As put in the book Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue, Customer Success is really three different, but closely related concepts: 1) an organization, 2) a discipline and 3) a philosophy.

As customer success is a nascent and fast emerging field, variance is still high with respect to its scope, reporting structure, terminology used for describing its activities, metrics used for measuring its performance and more. However, the key functions the CS team is often responsible for include:

Presently, the Customer Success function within most organizations is embodied in the Customer Success Manager (CSM) job title.

The CSM acts as the main point of contact and as a trusted advisor for the customer from the vendor side as they are the one 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.

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Wikipedia