“So what if there are applications being built for Customer Success? That certainly doesn’t make them necessary. I mean, c’mon, how hard can it really be? It’s not like Finance or Sales or even Marketing. Those organizations are complex and changing daily. Of course they need apps. But Customer Success? Just staff enough people and call every customer regularly and handle any problem that comes up, right? What’s an application going to do? Track all those calls and whatever issues come out of them? You can easily do that in Salesforce.”
Ah, the voice of the skeptic. Always good to hear from him. Let’s just throw out a few questions here to help him understand the breadth of “customer success” and the enormous competitive advantage available if you do it really well.
If you are successful as a company and get 1,000 customers, how do you staff to take care of them? Can you afford to have 20, 15, or even 10 people managing customers? Is their contract value a factor? Or how long they’ve been a customer? Do you know what your churn rate is? By contract value? By Industry? By Sales Rep? Can you predict the likelihood of churn for the customer you just signed up? Can you forecast renewals accurately based on the current risk in your install base? You probably know which customers own which of your products but do you know which products they are using and how often by how many people and for what purpose? And, more importantly, do you know the day they stopped using it?
Back to the skeptic – “Hmmm. Maybe it’s not quite as simple as I thought. What were the names of those solutions again?”
