What is Customer Success?

What is customer success anyways?  It’s a simple question with many varied and different answers.  I will let you in on a secret, no one does or defines customer success the same way.  In a nutshell customer success can be defined as making your customers happy, successful, and keeping them as customers.  Of course this is the most basic definition of what customer success is.  The idea is pretty simple actually.   Customers who are taken care of, feel like they are valued, and have their objectives met will stay customers longer.  This means you can increase the lifetime value of customer and reduce churn.

What are the top 5 benefits of having a team focused on customer success?

  • It can keep costs down: Not only is keeping customers way more cost effective then finding new ones, but developing and growing existing customers is an order of magnitude cheaper as well. TSIA for instance calculates that the cost to expand an existing customer is 6 times less expensive then the cost to acquire a customer.   There are similar cost benefits for renewal as well.
  •  It improves renewals, turning them into a non-event:  A lot of companies, especially smaller startups focus on renewals only as a transnational event one that occurs every month or every year.  The nature of a lot of sales teams for years is to land the big deal and move on.   This does not work anymore, customers have options and their business is as portable as ever.  You want to keep this customers happy.
  • Adoption and usage improves:  With the proper checkpoints and a healthy relationship established you you will find out more information on how the customer is using or not using your application.   This can predict churn, but also provides a wealth of information to the product team on how to enhance the product to not only meet a particular customers needs, but also those that are in a similar industry.
  • You uncover more opportunities:  As the team starts to help a customer achieve their objectives, the customer will be more open to bring you in to solve other critical problems.  They will also be more fourth coming about their business plans and projects, which gives you insight which is often hard to come by.
  • Customers turn into promoters:  Happy, engaged, and successful customers can turn into your secret sales weapon, evangelizing your software and the greatest of your team.


Categories: Customer Success Basics

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