Customer Success is a long-term, scientifically engineered and professionally directed strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven value. Note the key words/concepts in that sentence:
- Long-term: A viable, effective Customer Success team and program is not something that can be built overnight.
- Scientifically engineered: You can’t win at Customer Success without collecting and analyzing extensive and accurate data about your customers
- Professionally directed: Just as domain expertise is a necessary and vital attribute for customer-facing CSM’s, CS executives have to be highly skilled in running a profitable and effective group.
- Maximizing customer AND company: Both are equally important. A customer will leave if they do not perceive value in the relationship with your company. Your company will not continue to have a Customer Success team if it is not delivering strategically significant levels of ROI.
- Sustainable, proven value: The sale is never final. The relationship will persist only if both parties perceive measurable continuing value in it.
In practice, Customer Success Management is an integration of functions and activities of Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Training and Support into a new profession. There are three necessary building blocks for this emerging profession: an in-depth knowledge of the customers, effective knowledge of the product being sold, and extensive domain expertise.
Recommended Reading:
The Mission of Customer Success
The History of Customer Success
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