Can Customer Success truly transform your business?

Short answer, YES.

If you are not thinking about Customer Success, your business is already losing, today, right now. I’m not even overstating this. Customer Success emerged out of the need to look after and regularly engage with recurring customers, but it’s here to stay and to be at the core of any growth strategy.

We need to clarify one thing before you continue reading this article. Customer Success in SaaS organizations started as a test concept, quickly saw success and became a function, a team, within a SaaS organization. That’s changing. And, if that’s the only way you look at Customer Success today, then you need to realize that Customer Success is not just the team you look at when you discuss renewal or churn. It’s not just a team. Not just a group of individuals.

In any successful organization which is planning for its future success, CS is a strongly adopted mindset that is embedded into the DNA of the company itself. CS is how you do things, how you make decisions, how you prioritize the development of your offering, how you go to market, how you present your company to the public… it’s your worldview. It’s the lens through which you see things when you make important decisions about your business. This is and will continue to be one of the strongest differentiators between companies healthily headed towards the future, vs companies stuck into their thinking of ‘just getting the next renewal locked in’. And yes, you will still have a team called CS, who will very much be the carrier of this mindset, but if the whole organization doesn’t say ‘Yes’ to that, then it will not achieve its full potential.

Now that we have clarified that, let’s look into how this mindset of Customer Success can help you transform your business and position you for continued success in the future.

Focus is shifting away from silos of Marketing, Sales and Customer Success as separate functions, towards Growth concepts that address, simply, growth. Growth for you, growth for your customers using your offering, etc. Growing the existing base is at the center of many growth strategies, and for all the right reasons. It is much easier to expand an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Additional revenue coming from an existing customer is a sign of a healthy and happy customer base. Happy customers are your biggest advocates, around which you can design a lot of GTM strategies and marketing approaches. On the long run, happy customers can help you acquire new customers. This is just one aspect of many that support the approach of growth of the existing base as the right starting point when you build your growth strategy.

Customers’ needs are changing and it’s not enough to be engaging with them only via traditional methods. The customer of today is more demanding than ever. And you cannot blame them, when they are in an environment full of choices and options. A cooler kid appears around the corner – they don’t need to stay with you anymore. It’s really that simple. To keep customers on board, companies are going above and beyond offering all sorts of experiences and additional value to their customers. Customers demand more engaging, personalized experiences and a clear proof of the value your offering creates for them.

When you think of designing your customer experience, challenge what you might think makes sense. Traditionally, we would try to fit customers within certain processes and workflows that we have designed for them. This can start at onboarding and continue throughout the customer journey. “If you have any issues, please submit a ticket by clicking on this link” – is a great example of that. Trying to fit within your system and adapting to the processes you have designed for them is not intuitive for your customers. Approaching things that way, perhaps worked to a degree in the past. But today, you need to meet the customer right where they are and deliver the best customer experience exactly there, instead of trying to fit your customers within the processes you have designed. Rather, design new processes that allow for things to be EASY and seamless for your customer. That is the right mindset to have about delivering an extraordinary customer experience.

Truly understand your customer persona and design your business model to align with their needs. One very common concern for companies of this era is recurring revenue, and we know of all the reasons why this is important. I am not questioning that. However, one of the biggest mistakes you can do for your company is to shape it around a business model that does not fit who you sell to and for how much you sell it, and this can lead to your company literally going out of business. Think about it: you have created an offering that most likely solves some kind of problem for your customer. Now, how much do you actually know about your customer persona? Who are they? What do they do? What are their hobbies? What keeps them up at night? Why would they want to buy what you sell? How big of a problem could that fix for them? How long-term would that problem be fixed? If you stop existing tomorrow, how would that impact them? Are you selling them a necessity, or a nice to have? If it wasn’t for your offering, but similar ones existed, what would they do? Really, think about these things and do some proper analysis. Then, consider how you sell your offering and for how much. Based on what you could answer about your customer persona, does it seem like it makes sense? Are you too expensive, or leaving money on the table? Are you truly offering a subscription type of product and charging adequately for it, or is your product maybe not meant to be monetized that way? Or, maybe you are selling to the wrong persona? Your customers will only stick around for a long time if you have really found the right balance between the value of your offering, your pricing model and your price point. If either of these is out of balance, it will be hard for you to continue to retain your customers. It is important here that you are honest to yourself when you do this kind of assessment. You obviously want to do everything in your power in the best interest of your business, but think: by finding the right business model and the right customer for it, you have achieved exactly that!

I hope this article at least provoked some thought about the cruciality of having a Customer Success strategy and mindset adopted widely across your organization, as well as how it can help you reshape your business in a way that makes it more open and more thoughtful towards your customers. There is a lot more to discuss on this topic, and I will get back to it in another article!