November Book: Customer Success as a philosophy. Guide to make it happen.
Another month — another book. I am a bit late this time (see November), as it was hard to decide what are the most important things to share, I loved it a lot. But I also love to keep my articles below 5min reading time. Because I didn’t want to postpone it any longer, a fresh January review is coming, please see below the most explicit explanation of what is Customer Success I have ever read. So, “Customer Success. How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue” by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and, Lincoln Murphy. Happy reading!
This book is in a way a guidebook on how to build a Customer Success-oriented organization. It points out that Customer Success as a thing came from SaaS (Software as a Service) organizations and spread across other industries. There is a reason for that. In Saas, mainly because of the subscription model, you never stop winning your customers. You have to be customer-centered meaning understand every single need of your customer. In ideal, every day is spent with a constant focus on their success, not yours. How to achieve that? Book is guiding you from the very first steps where you have to understand the ideas behind the Customer Success and to actionable steps. Let’s speed dive into it.
Customer success as a philosophy
Customer success is a fundamental organizational change. It’s a philosophy. It’s not just a new title given to someone or a team, it’s a shift in how an organization perceives, works, supports its customers. It’s not anymore about a one-time sales event, it’s about building relationships with your customer to deliver long-term business success. This philosophy changes everything. It changes the organization.
So what is Customer Success? Is it just a fancy word to replace Customer Support? Authors say that in an ideal situation, these two teams are separated and a borderline is clearly set. There is usually an overlap in skills, but by meaning and actions every team takes, they are different. The biggest difference is probably Customer Success being proactive when Customer Support is reactive by its nature. To demonstrate this, an easy example when a customer comes with a problem. Customer Support: “Okay, I will help you”. Customer Success: “Okay, what has to be done so we won’t get this question again from another customer?” Customer Support is responsive, efficiency-oriented. Customer Success is predictive, analytics-focused. Big organizations need both teams. They will work closely, sometimes on the same customer cases, but separation is required in order to establish a process around Customer Success without losing the reactiveness of a Customer Support team.
Actionable steps
Define metrics. A big part of defining the new organization is to define what it will do and how it will be measured. Customer Success comes with the same need. Someone has to decide what are the most important metrics by which success will be determined: churn rate, gross revenues, adoption, NPS, etc. The next step is to establish activities that will drive those metrics: Health check, Education, Training, NPS questionary, Risk assessment, Quarterly Business Review, etc.
Own the metric. Important is that someone has to own those metrics. The author makes an example of sales. When you run a business, you have someone responsible for sales numbers. If you look at Customer Success, in the same way, don’t you need someone responsible for its metrics? “If many people own something, no one owns it”. Assign it to someone and give this person or team the autonomy to make that numbers happen — fight the resources, make strategic decisions, improve knowledge flow, create tools for product adoption, etc.
Predict and act. Customer success team is heavily analytics-focused. This helps to recognize which customer should be acted on, where there is an upsell opportunity, what can help to improve on a customer experience etc. It’s forward-looking, predictive, and proactive. So find people who fit this description as they are the ones to drive the organizational change.
Customer expect you to make them widely successful
Author points out that a bold truth is that customer doesn’t buy a product/solution/service to use its features. They buy it to achieve their own objectives with a help of that product, they buy a solution to their problem. So the value of relationships between business and customer is not only in the features of the product but in everything company does to make their customer better in what they do. The success of the customer is what matters the most.
To deliver this wild success business has to understand what success means to the customer:
- How customer measure success? What are their metrics?
- According to these metrics, is customer achieving success?
- What is their experience along the way? Even if customer is achieving success, how is their experience working with you and your product?
To start a journey to customer success, business must have the answers to these questions. It’s not only about helping customers to use a product, it is about helping them to see the opportunities and think about the next steps. Because business knows and understands the power of its product, because business knows how other customers are using the product, this knowledge can be an amazing tool to not only help customer success but also strengthen the relationships. When the customer sees that business have a vested stake in their success, they will collaborate and engage much more regularly providing vital feedback. Success is not a destination, it’s a journey.
Once business understood what is the success to their customer, helped them to achieve it, while having a great experience working together along the way, business will have the most valuable thing possible — an advocate. “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a colleague or a friend?” — “10! Amazing product and a great experience working together!”
I hope I only made you more curious about this book and you will add it to your reading list. Do you have any interesting books in mind to add to my list? Thank you for staying with me until these words 🌸 Do good, be kind, think open-minded 🌸
