The Customer Success Pioneer

The first 12 months of your journey into growth

Kellie Lucas

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788600392
• eBook ISBN: 9781788600408
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Rapporti con i clienti
• Index: Business

*SHORT-LISTED FOR THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2020!*

• Are you a Customer Success Executive or making your way up the Customer Success ladder?
  
• Do you want to transform churn into maximum recurring revenue and growth?
  
• Are you looking for a clear route to an established framework?
  
• Are you determined to be proactive, rather than constantly firefighting, with your customers?
  
• Is your company invested in or implementing a customer-focused philosophy?
  

If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you!
Customer Success is an emerging discipline for professionals pioneering revenue growth through customer relationships, outcomes, trust, loyalty, retention and referrals. The Customer Success Pioneer is a practical handbook for creating a best-in-practice Customer Success function from the ground up. It will help you ensure that your existing portfolio of customers become successful partners - delighted, committed and renewing - by putting in place processes that will work across your portfolio and into the future. This book will help you find the essential frameworks to maximise customer retention, recurring revenue and growth, build a productive and balanced team and excel as a Customer Success professional.

I

Welcome to Your Journey

Customer Success is…?

Customer Success is quite simply a business imperative to truly, consistently and perpetually know and understand your customers.

You may be confused and feel that this concept is already well known and adopted by businesses and indeed has been for many decades. After all, hasn’t the phrase ‘Customer is King’ been around for, like, forever?

This is true. We have paid lip service, for a very long time, to saying that the customer is always right and that we must be ‘customer-centric’. I have known many businesses who have this as one of their business values.

However, do we truly embody the practice or are we just creating the ‘spin’ required to fool customers into thinking we really care? In reality, our own profit margin and cost reduction exercises have always been the highest priority.

With the transition from perpetual licence to subscriptions (see below), the technology world can no longer afford to be blasé about this topic.

It is literally life or death for your business, if you are not fully and demonstrably committed to knowing and understanding your customer. Return on Investment (RoI) has also been crowned as being king and for your customers; this is absolutely a key objective. It is imperative you can support the delivery of their business objectives and prove your contribution to them and their RoI.

In a business economy where customers have freedom of movement more than ever before, the urgency for embracing Customer Success is a reality.

Nothing is more important to Salesforce than customer success … And that’s why I believe being so committed to the customer is more important than it’s ever been … because it’s really this culture that’s driving us forward.

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce

This is the reason that the specific discipline and category of Customer Success has been created. It is also the reason that it is under the glare of a bright spotlight and is one of the fastest growing career opportunities.

The power has truly shifted from the vendor to the customer. This is the case for Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) and across all industries.

Customers demand results and if they are not happy, they can and will move their business elsewhere at a moment’s notice.

There are no more lifetime tie-ins brought about by hefty cancellation penalties or seriously large upfront capital expenditure.

No longer can the vendor blot the ink dry on a contract and then walk away without giving the customer another glance.

We have to support them, we have to care and we have to deliver business objectives.

Again, you may feel that each function within a business already has a handle on this, but isn’t it true that we’re all working in silos, focused on our task and our responsibility?

Who is working across all of those functions to ensure there is collaboration, alignment, consistency and a focus on ensuring that everything being done has the customer front of mind?

The answer is the Customer Success team and the Chief Customer Officer (CCO).

Origin stories

Customer Success has its roots in the SaaS world (see below). Think of all the services which are delivered via the internet these days – Box, MS Office365, G-Suite, Slack, Survey Monkey, Dropbox, Trello, etc. All of these are software, delivered remotely as a service. Some are free, some always paid for or where premium offerings are paid for, via subscription – consider Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, etc.

What is Software (or anything) as a Service?

In the good old days of Information Technology when hardware was prohibitively expensive and the internet and ‘cloud’ didn’t exist, IT companies made the majority of their income from the sale of the hardware and software alone. This would be paid upfront, as capital expenditure.

The subscription element existed as a comparatively low value (and mandatory) annual support and maintenance contract. If you opted out of this payment, you would forfeit your right to any vendor-provided support and would not receive any product update releases.

The customer took on all the capital expense and the risk of the transaction, the project and the ongoing administration:

• Hardware capital expenditure

• Software capital expenditure

• Annual maintenance and support contract

• Hardware maintenance costs

• Project implementation costs and responsibility

• Perpetual administration

For even the smallest of projects and companies, this undertaking would cost thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions as an upfront, non-refundable investment.

The vendor rubbed their hands with glee before...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Praise for The Customer Success Pioneer
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I Welcome to your journey
• Part II Design. Implement. Measure. Evolve (DIME)
• Key imperatives for your journey
• Glossary
• Resources
• About the author