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1/ I spent the last 6 months diving deep into Customer Success (CS) as I’m a fundamental believer in the role, the focus on the customer, and the impact it can have on the trajectory of the company. A quick thread on the evolution, some learnings and thoughts:
2/ SaaS tools have obviously exploded over the last 10+ years, but it was driven by the evolution of how software was sold and deployed going from on prem to the cloud, thus the original explosion of tools focused on sales and marketing of acquiring the customer
3/ Sales and marketing innovation made it easier to acquire customers, customer retention became more challenging due to lower switching costs. CS teams formed and startups started focusing on the customer journey. @Kanzajy gives a great overview of CS in his @foundingsales book!
4/ Thus there are more CS roles. More Chief Customer Officer roles now vs. the traditional COO role. Companies are building CS programs and strategies. See @ChrisHicken and @emiliadanzica take on where CS should report https://blog.nuffsaid.com/fix-sales-and-customer-success-friction
5/ Customer success should be thought of as a key driver of growth vs. churn as a prevention strategy.
6/ Thanks to @Gainsight leading the charge but we’re still in in the early innings of CS as great platform companies are being built like @CatalystIO, @nuffsaid, @clientsuccess @vitally_io @churnzero and many others
7/ Like Sales did w/ prospecting, enablement etc. CS is encompassing categories like onboarding( @pendoio), customer education( @workramp @skilljar). Support should be included too( @acquire_io @forethought_ai). Community( @insidedmedia @Commsor) is becoming critical to the CS puzzle
8/ From our survey (specific to CSMs) and chats: most churn resulted from lack of product value seen from customers; coincidentally wanted software to help increase product adoption but also to identify at-risk/upsell customers and automate certain tasks along the way
9/ Biggest challenges are a reactive approach to customers and org alignment. Also, no singular answer to where CSMs spend most of their time or believe they should spend their time which to me says the function is still evolving. One CS org may look different than another’s.
10/ We’re big believers on focusing on the customer so much so we spent the better part of last year looking at tools solely focused on improving all parts of the customer journey. If you’re working on something related or have different viewpoints, feel free to reach out.
