What is Customer Success?

I have been thinking a great deal about Customer Success lately. Just some minor things like :
– What it is, really?
– Who should do it?
– How should it be done?

The function of Customer Success is both one of the oldest fields of professional interaction and one of the newest, depending on how you slice it and I’ve had some time lately to reflect on it a bit. Titles like “Customer Success Manager” have really only been commonplace for less than a decade but the things those people do have been the keys to success for high-performing people for much longer.

To explain some background, my first actual paying job ever was washing dishes in a restaurant about 40 years ago, back when everything was manual, before cell phones and the Internet. It was only a few weeks before I moved to a food prep station and eventually to a grill. The following years of working in the hospitality industry taught me some of the most valuable lessons of my life. I worked as a waiter, tended bar, pumped gas, rented out jet skis and boats on the beach, and cooked everything from mushroom soup to Chateaubriand and Coquilles Saint-Jacques. After working in kitchens helped pay my way through college, I landed a job as a technician, fixing office equipment in a variety of busy offices where I was exposed to a wide range of business conversations. Mostly, I spoke to people – many, many people. These experiences laid the foundation for the rest of my career working with people, building solutions, and filling people’s needs, something we now call Customer Success.

One very important thing that is key to the role of any CS person is to understand that your job is all about making people successful, not just doing whatever makes them happy. It is even in the title “Customer SUCCESS”. Customers can be blissfully ignorant of features that will make them more productive and you could just let them be happy using your products as is, but eventually, some competitor will come along and show them how to be more successful with their competing product and you will lose that customer – possible over a feature you had but never took the time to demonstrate. But isn’t that “sales”? Hmmm…

You have probably heard the phrase “We are all in sales” and it is true to some degree. While the people with “sales” in their titles are really responsible and tasked with achieving targets, everyone in your company has to take some role in helping in the sale of your product. Similarly, “We are all in customer success”, and similarly, while the people in the Customer Success team are directly responsible for customers being successful, everyone in the company needs to take some role in helping them get there.

Talking to people and genuinely listening is not just a role for Sales and CS, it is critical for Product Managers, Marketers, and Developers as well. But this is really the area where CS leaders shine. A skilled Customer Success Manager, or Solutions Engineer, or Technical Account Manager, or Support Engineer can help a customer ask the right questions and guide them to an effective solution that may or may not include adding a product or changing the way they use a tool. They can probe into how the customer actually operates, and what effect it has on their business, and examine the outcomes that could be possible with a little additional guidance.

The work doesn’t stop at the customer conversation though. A good CS person is all about thought leadership and will take those customer conversations back to Product and Marketing and Sales to further develop them with a wider audience. They are investigators, collaborators, helpers and fixers. They can empathize with their customers but also understand the business drivers for mutual success. Front-line Support Engineers and Technical Account Managers are goldmines of direct customer usage intelligence. Solutions Engineers often hear key data points about what your product does well, but also where it is missing in the competitive landscape. All of them together are the voice of the customer.

So, What it is, really? Customer Success is the function of ensuring your customers are making the best use of your products and services in the most productive way. That may lead to sales or product enhancements, or accolades for your website, but mostly it is about understanding and empathizing with your customers and prospective customers.

Who should do it? Everyone, at least to some degree. If you are not in business to make customers successful with your products, then what is the point? Of course, the answer you were expecting was “The Customer Success Team”, but they are just the tip of the spear. These are your front-line people outside the Sales team who talk to customers and prospects every day. They are the voice of the customer and are key to every product and planning decision your company makes. They hold key intel and manage the relationships that make or break your organization.

How should it be done? So many organizations still try to do this with the Sales team, or volunteers from Engineering, or loosely filtered from the support team. But to truly be successful in today’s world, CS needs to be an official organization driven by a leader with a solid team who are dedicated to the function of making customers successful. That team needs to have clear lines of communication with Product, Marketing, Legal and Finance, and then needs to be empowered and have the autonomy to do what is needed to make customers successful.

Do I have all the answers? Not even close, but I do have had a few decade’s worth of conversations, successes and failures to inform an opinion that has been valid so far.

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