Redefining Customer Success
Customer success is a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape, and is finally broadly recognized as such in the recent decade. As the subscription model has gained traction and spread from the cloud and SaaS to more sectors of the economy, that pivotal role will only grow in importance. If you want to compete and thrive in this new environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy. You need to recognize that you’re no longer selling a tangible product; you’re selling an experience and outcome.
In this modern B2B landscape, vendors must deliver success for their clients to achieve success for their own businesses, which is why customer success teams are being created in companies to own the holistic journey of the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up-sell, and advocacy. Of course, customer success is not just about driving renewals and up-sell; it’s also about building long-term relationships with customers and ensuring their success, which in turn drives your own sustained success.
My Success is Built on the Success of My Customer’s Customer
According to the book Customer Success: Innovative Companies are Recurring Revenue with a Field-Proven Framework, customer success is about making sure that customers achieve their own business outcomes. This means that a vendor’s success is built on their customer’s success, and in turn, their customer’s customer’s success. By enabling your customers to realize value in your products, you’re protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life. But to achieve this, companies must focus on the success of their customers’ customers.
Take Salesforce, by example. The success Salesforce has achieved is admirable, enabling their customers to more efficiently track and manager client relations and cases, as well as communities and knowledge. But, that in and of itself isn’t the real story… in enabling their customer’s to be successful with improving efficiencies, Salesforce is enabling their direct customers to more effectively service the indirect, or secondary customers for more impactful results. Thereby, Salesforce is enabling their customers to provide more efficient and exceptional service to achieve those business outcomes and creating success for their customer’s customer.
It’s a little bit Jerry Maguire (help me help you…) and a little bit Interstellar (…perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun).
Redefining Customer Success Culture
More and more customer success is being redefined as a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape. If you want to compete and thrive in this environment, you need to put the customer at the center of your strategy and recognize that you are selling an outcome, not just a product. By redefining customer success and focusing on the success of your customers’ customers, you can create a more sustainable business model by building a customer-centric culture that will help you thrive in the generative information age. Companies that put their customers’ success first will be the ones that succeed in the long run.
Ultimately, companies need to reimagine customer success and design organizations that manage customer relationships with a focus on organization-wide alignment around the customer and what success means to them. By ensuring their customers achieve success, they are driving their own success and creating a more sustainable business model. This means that the vendor’s success is not just dependent on their own customers, but also on the success of their customers’ customers.
Remember, customer success is not just a function, it is the promise companies make to customers. By building a common understanding of customers, transforming organizational models to deliver exceptional customer experience, and changing how customer-facing functions are managed, companies can take the lead in redefining customer success.
Key Takeaways
- Customer success is about making sure that customers achieve their own business outcomes.
- A vendor’s success is built on their customer’s success, and in turn, their customer’s customer’s success.
- Companies must focus on the success of their customers’ customers to create a more sustainable business model.
- Customer success is being redefined as a critical asset to organizations across the business landscape.
- Building a common understanding of customers, transforming organizational models to deliver exceptional customer experience, and changing how customer-facing functions are managed are all essential steps in redefining customer success.
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