If you sit in a room with Customer Success Professionals you will likely hear some pretty specific and detailed Customer Success (CS) topics, such as customer success metrics, coverage models, and success plan outcomes just to name a few. While these are important topics, we thought it was worthwhile to go back to basics and discuss what CS means to the team at WNTD and what our operating philosophy is.
We asked ourselves a very basic question – what is Customer Success?
My partners and I immediately dove into the weeds and discussed elements of Customer Success, such as managing the post-sale customer journey, onboarding programs, quarterly business reviews and 1:Many campaigns. By the time we finished our coffee, we realized what we had discussed was Customer Success programs, actions, and deliverables rather than defining what customer success is. Our brainstorming notes were what Customer Success does but not what it is.
We took a step back and talked about the purpose of Customer Success and why it exists as a business disciple. To answer that question we had to rewind back 10 to 15 years ago. At this point, Client Services and Professional Services teams existed but a few key things changed that created the need for Customer Success.
- The world of SaaS emerged, and with it came the subscription-based business model.
- Customers can far more easily switch products and platforms so churn became just as an important factor as new business revenue
- Customers expectations have changed. They expect an ongoing partnership with their vendors. They also expect technology to be more and more intuitive, not too unlike the ease of use of consumer apps on their phones.
With these factors in mind, we discussed the purpose of Customer Success as preventing churn by ensuring product adoption across the customer base. From there we discussed how a customer success team delivers the outcome of product adoption. CS accomplishes this by not only helping their customers solve problems, meet goals, and achieve the outcomes that they were looking for when they purchased your product or service – but Customer Success accomplishes this by anticipating customers needs.
How a CSM achieves high levels of product adoption throughout their base can vary depending on the product, however, one element of how to achieve this should be consistent. That element is proactive enablement. In order to anticipate needs, you need to be proactive. We agreed on proactive enablement as the fundamental component because there are other functions within an organization that helps customers use a product successfully as well but in a reactive way. For example, if there is a bug reported by a customer, the Support and Product teams react to the issue by responding to a ticket and building a fix for the bug. Technical Support is vital but reactive by design.
A great Customer Success team, on the other hand, is focused on proactively helping customers and answering questions before the customer even has them. As clients go through the customer journey we should anticipate most of their questions and provide them with the answers before they even realize they have the question. This should also be happening methodically across an entire customer base and not reactively as questions and issues come up. Provided the organization is in tune with their target market, and that CSMs understand what desired outcomes their customers are looking to achieve, then getting in front of the questions is realistic. This also positions CSMs to be seen by their customers as a trusted advisor.
In short: anticipating customers needs and guiding them through to successful product adoption is enabling your clients to achieve their desired outcomes. This is proactive enablement. This is what Customer Success is all about.
This led us to define customer success as proactive enablement.
Customer Success professionals should be continuously looking for ways to guide customers to achieve their goals and success outcomes. With this line of focus, your CS team should be well positioned to reduce churn, increase product adoption and develop a relationship where they are seen as a trusted advisor.
We’d like to know what Customer Success means to you. Let us know in the comments below.
