Customer Success
The problem with Customer Success is everyone thinks it's something different.
What everyone thinks CS is
Customer Success thinks their job is to retain customers and maximize their success with your products.
The CEO thinks it's a marketing role.
The customer thinks it's an everything role: business consultant, technical expert, and also a user of the product themselves.
Sales thinks customer success is there to mind-read the customer so they know how to sell the next upgrade or the next product.
What I've seen
I did customer success for two different software companies for ~8 years. I have many thoughts about CS. Most of them being all different ways to say what management gets wrong about CS and why most companies' idea of the purpose of CS is wrong and how CS people get really bad direction and training from management.
How CS devolves
CS generally devolves into sort of this weird liaison role. CS ends up being the person who just connects the customer to other people: sales, tech support, professional services.
CS is positioned as the customer's go-to expert; however, CS is never given the tools, training to ever provide the end solution to the customer.
CS is told:
- Anything tech-related belongs to customer support
- Any meaningful upselling or new product line talk goes to sales
- Any conceptual, business problem-solving goes to professional services
So what exactly is CS left to do?
Somehow, despite not being able to clearly and distinctly answer this question, it's still CS's responsibility to hit retention numbers and even upsell and cross-sell numbers.
It's nonsense.
In other cases, customer success people, due to bad (or a lack of) training, think their job is to make excuses for their company to their customer at all costs.
I've taken complaints to CS and get emails back with their company's CSAT scores. And I'm just flabbergasted that that's their response.
The CS person who sent me that thinks they're there to convince me that their product is perfect and I should love life because I get to use their product.
How to fix it
The first action to take:
A complete overhaul of your definition for what it means to be successful as a customer success person.
Stop
Stop requiring your customer to talk to 8 different people, schedule 3 different meetings, only to come to a service agreement proposal for 80 hours of professional services to get them an answer to their question.
I want to help you define the role, stabilize the expectations, and create a path for your customer success people to thrive.
What we'll do together
- Define clear boundaries between CS, Support, Sales, and Professional Services
- Give CS the tools and authority to actually solve problems
- Create metrics that measure actual customer success, not just activity
- Build onboarding processes that set customers up for success from day one
- Establish workflows that don't require 8 touchpoints to get an answer
Did this resonate?
Let's work together to re-shape customer success in your org.