4 Pillars of Customer Success

Customer Success is not about saving a drowning customer but rather prevent them from falling in the water in the first place.

Customer Success Management is the proactive orchestration of the customer’s journey toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome.

4 Pillars of Customer Success

Proactive Not Re-active

Strive to understand the customer, their current and future challenges and create a proactive plan to address them.

In today's world, where customers have numerous options and high expectations, being reactive is no longer sufficient. Customers are looking for companies that understand their current and future challenges and provide proactive solutions. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to strive to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to customer success.

Here are the two major areas you should focus on to becoming proactive with customers:

• Right Data to Predict Behavior – Revenue Trends, Product Usage, Engagement, and Feedback

• Manage All Risks – Political, Adoption, Operational, and Financial

Right Data to Predict Behavior

Revenue trends can indicate the overall health of the customer's business. By tracking SaaS and services revenue, CS can understand whether the customer is growing or declining. This data can help identify opportunities for upsell and cross-sell, or it can alert CS to potential churn risks.

Product usage data is another critical indicator of customer behavior. By tracking usage metrics such as ticket data (count, severity, velocity, and turn-around times), users, and workflow actions, companies can determine how engaged the customer is with the product. If usage is increasing, it can indicate a satisfied customer, but if usage is decreasing, it can indicate potential problems. Product usage patterns can also indicate what’s popular and where the pain points are.

Engagement data indicates the frequency of interactions between the customer and the company. By tracking engagement data, companies can understand how frequently customers are interacting with their people, products or services. This will allow to create a more personalized customer journey with specific actions regarding better engagement with the customer.

Feedback is crucial means for hearing directly from the customer about their needs, concerns, and expectations. Companies should collect data provided by customers through surveys or other channels to understand their satisfaction level, identify areas for improvement, and address concerns.

Manage All Risks

In addition to analyzing the right data, CS should also strive to manage all risks proactively. By understanding the customer's current and expected future challenges, CS can take action to prevent or mitigate potential issues. Some of the risks that CS should consider include political, adoption, operational, and financial risks.

Political risks refer to friction between business units or changes in the executive team or sponsor. These risks can impact the customer's satisfaction and can lead to potential churn. Therefore, CS should work to identify these risks and take action to mitigate them.

Adoption risks refer to challenges faced by the customer in realizing the expected value and adoption from business teams. CS should work closely with customers to identify these challenges and provide proactive solutions.

Operational risks refer to customer happiness around services and support. Companies should strive to provide excellent customer service and address any perceived quality gaps regarding the product.

Financial risks refer to whether the program has the necessary budget and whether the customer is doing financially. CS should monitor these risks closely and take action if necessary.

Depth & Quality of Engagement

Why is my customer churning when I have had a great relationship with my point of contact and was getting great feedback?

The answer is simple: there are multiple stakeholders, sponsors, decision makers and influencers beyond your point of contact. Having a good relationship with just one person does not necessarily mean you have a deep and broad relationship with the entire organization. To truly understand the customer, you need to go beyond your point of contact and develop relationships with other key stakeholders. There are two ways to creating depth and quality of relationships:

- Relationship 360 – Go higher and broader

- Become a Trusted Advisor

Relationship 360 – Go higher and broader

The key to achieving this is to establish a Relationship 360. This means going higher and broader within the organization to develop relationships with IT and Business Executives, Sponsors, and Influencers. By doing so, you can gain a better understanding of the customer's goals, challenges, and priorities.

It's also important to create multiple champions within the organization – people who are committed to your product/brand and can advocate on your behalf. These champions can help you connect with other decision-makers and influencers within the organization, providing you with a better understanding of the customer's needs and preferences.

In addition to building relationships within the organization, it's important to connect customers to each other. By creating a community of customers, you can gain valuable insights into their needs, priorities and best practices around solving end to end problems. You can also leverage partners who work with the customer to provide additional insights that the customer may not share with you.

Become a Trusted Advisor

To become a Trusted Advisor to your customers, you need to truly understand what is driving them. This means going beyond the surface-level feedback and understanding the underlying needs, motivations, and goals of the organization.

One of the most important habits to develop as a trusted advisor is transparency. Be open and honest about what you can and cannot deliver and be upfront about any challenges or limitations you may face. This will help build trust with the customer and establish you as a reliable partner.

Value and Solution Focused

Focus on Value created and not just successful milestones.

As businesses strive to remain competitive in today's market, it's important to focus on creating value and delivering solutions that meet the needs of customers. This means going beyond just achieving successful milestones and focusing on the value that is created through these milestones. Lets explore how businesses can become value and solution-focused, and what frameworks they can use to achieve these goals. I have a separate blog – Developing a Value Roadmap for Customer that goes into much more details on this topic.

Business Value

Assessing the value realized is critical for businesses to understand how successful their solutions have been in creating value for their customers. Maximizing the potential value/outcomes that businesses can achieve requires a systematic approach that goes beyond just completing tasks. To achieve this, businesses can use the Business Value Prioritization Framework, which is designed to create a value and prioritization framework for businesses. The framework helps businesses identify the most critical aspects of their solutions that create the most value for their customers and prioritize them accordingly.

Product Value

The goal of any product is to provide value to the customer. Ensuring that the customer is getting the most out of the product is critical for achieving long-term success. To achieve this, businesses can use the Product Value Index, which creates a value map for realized vs. potential product value. This allows businesses to identify areas where their product is underperforming and focus their efforts on improving those areas.

Roadmap

A roadmap is critical for businesses to ensure that they are focusing on the right solutions and achieving the desired outcomes. The Roadmap Development Framework provides a systematic approach to developing a short-term and long-term roadmap for the customer. The framework helps businesses identify the most critical milestones and tasks that are necessary to achieve the desired outcomes and prioritize them accordingly.

Customer Centric Organization

An organization working together will result in better outcomes for customer.

It is critical for organizations to become customer centric. This means putting the customer at the heart of everything the organization does. A customer-centric organization focuses on creating positive experiences for customers at every touchpoint. Here are the following things that should be done to become customer centric:

• Collaboration Model Across All Functions Engaging with Customers

• Be the "Voice of Customer" Within the Organization

• Develop Detailed Customer Stories Showing Value Journey

Collaboration Model Across All Functions Engaging with Customers

One of the essential components of a customer-centric organization is collaboration across all functions engaging with customers. CS must create a customer journey path and various touchpoints across the organization. To achieve this, the CS should build a detailed RASCI matrix that outlines the roles and responsibilities of each function. The matrix helps identify the touchpoints where each function interacts with the customer, allowing the organization to create a seamless and consistent experience for the customer.

Be the "Voice of Customer" Within the Organization

To become a customer-centric organization, it's essential for CS to be the "voice of customer" within the organization. The organization should have a single customer view/dashboard across the organization, allowing every function to see the customer's interactions with the organization. Additionally, the CS should implement a customer desk process that enables the organization to collaboratively look at challenges and create organization-wide action and mitigation plans. This approach ensures that the organization works together to solve customer issues, creating a seamless experience for the customer.

Develop Detailed Customer Stories Showing Value Journey

Finally, it's essential to develop detailed customer stories showing the value journey. Customer stories help to understand the customer's pain points and how we can create value for the customer. CS should use customer stories to identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and create value for the customer.

In conclusion, the four pillars of customer success – proactive and not reactive, data-driven, depth and quality of relationships, and value-focused – are critical components of any successful customer success strategy. By adopting a customer-centric approach, businesses can ensure that their customers derive maximum value from their product or service, leading to increased customer loyalty and long-term business success.

Please note: For further discussion or to explore these topics in more detail, feel free to reach out to Ninad Raikar @ ninadraikar@gmail.com or book a session at https://www.datamanagementinsights.com/book-online.