Have you heard about Customer Success (CS) yet?

You certainly may want to know a bit more about this term, as businesses start to focus on what Success means to its customers, organisational performance and profitability.

Here is a quick Q&A on CS that hopefully will get you better acquainted with the term:

1. What is the definition of Customer Success?

The most accepted, answer comes from the work developed by Lincoln Murphy, who has helped develop a benchmark in Customer Success since the term and activity began to take shape in the market: "Customer Success is when your customers achieve their desired result through interactions with your company".

2. Is CS a method, a business strategy or a concept?

Let's look at the definitions of these terms to help answer this question.

A method is a procedure, technique, or steps to do something.

Strategy is the art of effectively applying available resources and exploiting favorable conditions to achieve certain objectives.

A concept is an opinion, point of view, conviction.

So, if there is conviction about steps to be taken to achieve a superior business outcome, this will trigger the application of certain techniques and procedures, making effective use of the resources available to achieve a desired outcome.

From this it follows that CS is a concept at its root. From then on, the concept will translate into a company value, business culture trait, a team, etc.

3. Where did the Customer Success term come from?

The first company that applied techniques to improve customer interactions was Salesforce in 1999. From then on, these techniques spread through employees who moved to different companies and applied the concept to their new business environments.

The first reports where CS is actually named so, go back to 2014 in Brazil.

4. Is CS an isolated department or a ad-hoc practitioner in my company?

Neither.

If you agree with our previous arguments - that CS is a concept - then it will be easy to understand that it goes beyond an individual or business area.

The conceptualisation of CS helps understand what is its place in organisations, as it drives the setting of a parameters and guidelines to gauge if the client service mix is ​actually being delivered by the entire business.

5. Is CS a type of premium support intended to be provided only to customers that pay more or are considered more valuable?

It is not.

More to the point, the goal of CS is to understand customer success, not only when clients need support, but in all the interactions they have with the company, including product/service research, buying decision, onboarding, etc.

6. Can any company apply CS concepts?

Yes.

If the company has customers, it needs to worry about customer success. Simple!

Currently the concept is predominant in startups, SaaS and technology companies, but it is just a matter of time before it is adopted by other businesses and markets. We are aware of clinics, radio stations, bakeries and law firms who have embraced CS.

7. Will the application of CS help you get actionable data?

Yes.

Some metrics are already very popular among technology companies and SaaS, such as CAC, lifetime value, Churn, net promoter score. But these metrics need to go beyond specific transaction satisfaction; they need to tell a customer's life story.

Other important data driven insights from CS practices: customers segments trends, regional trends, contact level habits; how frequently do you need to contact clients to preserve and enhance their engagement with your business? And much more!

8. Who works with CS, who are the professionals in the area?

There are various nomenclatures, such as CSM (customer success manager), CSE (customer success experience), CSI (customer success implementation).

There is still no formal professional education or courses for CS practitioners. Roles connected to CS are administration, training, pre-sales, marketing, technical.

The profile of the CS professional is that of a dynamic individual and group, always closely connected to the product areas of the company and a strong tendency to use well rounded communication and relationships skills to become client advocates.

It is my observation that the majority of companies are developing CS experts by selecting talent with strong comms and relationship skills who then go onto being trained in the products and services their business delivers.

9. As a business, where to begin with Customer Success?

Putting the customer as the center of your business and mapping their journey is essential.

You can start by separating customers by groups, and looking for commonalities in terms of their experience with your product or service. This segmentation will also create streams of work within your business as to what to tackle first in terms of your teams’ focus areas (e.g. onboarding).

If the company already has a large number of customers, we hope that you have some history for these customers. If you have not, do not worry, today is the best day to start gathering this information.

10. How do you actually find out how your customers define “Success”?

Two quick steps that may sound obvious: Mapping the client's journey AND asking them.

Let's take an example: have you noticed how the "journey" in a supermarket unfolds in front of you?

Usually you enter from one side; in the corridor where the pasta is the cheese and sauce will be handy; the exit is on the other side. That is the journey

Success to me would be to have the desired brand, but also to have olive oil, perhaps a quick recipe sheet in the same aisle and being able to pay without having to queue!

What I tried to illustrate is that mapping the journey is different from knowing what Success is for each one of us. So it is important to stay in tune with how you customers use your product, how they generate value from it, and how you ultimately enable “Success” from their perspective,

Now that you are more familiar with what Customer Success is I hope you put this concept in your business radar. Implementing Customer Success in organisations, as I will try to argue in subsequent articles is both an operational task but also involves deep buy-in at corporate culture level.

** This article is the translation of the original post written by Ms Roberta Silva, Customer Success Specialist. Her article was adapted, translated and posted here with her permission.