Customer Success has become the mantra for software companies in the SaaS space to create a profitable company. I recently did a presentation to group of leaders from the technology space around how Customer Success is changing the very fabric of a software company.
Customer Success is not a new term used for the erstwhile function of customer support or for that matter, account management or client services. Those functions are driven by goals that are self-serving for the company. Customer Success on the other hand should be a passionate focus on customer and the value delivered to them.
About Subraya Mallya
Subraya Mallya is a technology executive, entrepreneur involved in conceiving, building software businesses. In this blog, he focusses on business and technology strategies around Business Model, Product Development and Marketing. Connect with me on Twitter - @subrayamallya
October 4th, 2013 at 2:25 PM
Subraya, thanks for sharing this presentation – You know how dear to my heart this subject is 😉
I have two main comments.
The first is on the role of customer success. There are two camps to customer success.
Camp I are of name steelers. Basically managing customers like in the pre-cloud/pre-subscription world, however, calling it ‘Customer Success’. And the second camp is those who understand that customer success is a cross-company function, that is focused on making sure customers realize value from the online product offering. I believe you’ve meat the second one, right?
Second comment is about the metrics.
Churn, CLTV, upsell are all lagging business indicators.
Customer Success teams should focus on managing and growing leading indicators/metrics such as – usage, customer health, adoption and value which will impact the financial metrics.
Great job!
Guy
October 7th, 2013 at 10:54 AM
Agree about the pretenders who just rename customer service or account manager as customer success. I also see it is a cross functional role that keeps customer’s interest at the top in all activities in the company.
On the second part of metrics – I think all metrics measurement should be a continuum and not just specific to a phase. Start with adoption, conversion, engagement and measure value delivered.
January 7th, 2014 at 12:51 PM
Great presentations, this will sure help a lot of companies realize and re-instate the importance of customer success when it comes to integrating cloud into their system infrastructure.