One of the realities of Customer Success that is certainly recognized by practitioners – but may be missed by most of the rest of the organization – is that it actually contains all the other customer-facing functions within it (a topic touched on previously). A complete Customer Success operation would ideally contain elements of Strategy,
It is impossible to understand and engage your customers in a one-size-fits-all fashion if you have more than a handful of customers. You’ve probably been told – or told others – something like this: “Here are your 150 customers, now go understand them and get engaged.” Yikes! Okay, so I’ve done this a thousand times and
When it comes to Customer Success, amazing things happen when you use – and I mean really use – your own product. Call it whatever you like – “eating your own dogfood”, “drinking your own champagne”, whatever. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. At Gainsight, we live this to the fullest.
When you create your customer journey map, outline the process your customers take to that first “Wow!” moment and eventually onto realizing value and achieving success, you must do so with them in mind. Obviously. But how do you overlay what happens on your side to ensure that success map is followed; that your customers
Earlier this week, Lincoln wrote a fantastic article that outlined the three most common methods for measuring CSM performance. If you adopt any of the three methods outlined, you will be well on your way to increased retention and upsells. I’d like to add to that list with one more measurement that, unfortunately, not enough companies are using
As with most jobs, there may be many different ways to measure the performance of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) It’s a complex job encompassing many different activities and working with many different kinds of customers. The biggest variable is probably the maturity of your company, which will dictate the specific role you’ll be playing.
Customer Success is NOT about creating Happy Customers. While I agree generally with the thesis of this Harvard Business Review article correlating customer satisfaction with long-term customer loyalty, I have to take issue with – if not their findings – the delivery of those findings that could cause confusion. Particularly, I take issue with this quote:
Just like any job, it’s important to quickly and efficiently get Customer Success Managers (CSM) up and running. Subscription Economy companies like yours spend a lot of money to acquire customers, so keeping them delighted, renewing, and wanting to buy more is absolutely critical to long-term success, which is where the CSMs come into play.
At Gainsight we help Enterprise SaaS, Ad Tech, and other subscription businesses implement Customer Success strategies through our articles, presentations, and of course our Customer Success Management technology. …and somewhere along the way, I inadvertently became the Neil Clark Warren of Customer Success (founder of eHarmony for those tracking) matching Customer Success executives with job
Calculating customer health – to show both customer satisfaction and loyalty – is a primary focus for Customer Success managers. A successful customer base is what keeps a subscription business like enterprise Software-as-a-Service and Ad Tech alive and thriving. Which is why I’m excited to share with you the third research paper from Forrester Research, which continues