customer success

The Challenges

It's particularly difficult in the early stages of your firm's  growth, where you need to: 

• Produce technology that is as compelling as possible
• Identify and close customers at the right cost of customer acquisition (CAC), keeping CAC at a minimum
• Maintain and improve the annual recurring revenue (ARR) for each customer
• Drive a greater lifetime customer value (LTV)

The Way Forward

A robust program of Customer Success will drive your business forward. It is a way of long term business execution aligning vendor and customer goals. As the vendor assumes a proactive role in shaping positive outcomes for the customer’s use of the technology, a deeper level of partnership ensues.

Project Management

Mitigating potential risks before they become critical issues is a key facet of Customer Success. Three areas of best practice enable this:

• Project management - guiding effective risk and outcome management
• Change management - managing technology adoption in support of the business process(es)
• Communications management - surfacing issues and successes early and clearly where they can be either effectively mitigated or used to further adoption

Organizational Disciplines

World class Customer Success execution leverages the relationship with the following necessary (but insufficient on their own) disciplines:

• Account management - traditionally been all about managing the flow of revenue from the customer and in many ways the precursor to customer success. Managing the money is still (very!) important but it is a measure of great customer success management, not the primary form of it.
• Professional Services (pre and post sale) - as this is the first “up close and personal” connection a potential or new customer gets of your technology, their interaction with the customer and your product sales team have a lot to say in shaping a positive future conversation.
• Customer (Support) Services - this largely reactive discipline is probably the most valuable when there is a problem, but least respected. Everyone wants the plumber to come by right away and repair your leaky face quickly and cheaply… but we’d all rather the faucet didn’t leak in the first place.
• Training/Mentoring - either 1:1 or group sessions. This critical role in ensures the customer not only uses the technology and the business process properly, but also provides an opportunity to deliver an expanded potential vision of use for the current or extended technology products.

The Benefits

• Reduced cost of customer acquisition - with a better proposition to prospects and less friction at renewal time with less churn
• Increased revenue - greater customer penetration leads to upsell opportunities for base product and add-ons
• Improved long term customer value - longer term (positive) relationships result directly in more revenue per customer

So, why is it important? Your business success is intimately connected to your customer's success. Widespread adoption of your product at successfully managed companies leads to long term engagements, a broader base of sales and, a healthier ecosystem for your technology.