Customer Success is transformative.
Whether you have a Software-as-a-Service, subscription or membership business or you sell one-off products or services and simply want to do business with your customer more than once, Customer Success should be your driving purpose.
Customer Success has its roots in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world and my original definition was very much SaaS-centric.
But since then, companies that are not SaaS, or even technology companies at all, have recognized the transformative power of Customer Success and embraced it as their new operating model.
If you aren’t familiar with exactly how Customer Success is transformative, I’ll lay that out for you below in great detail in this guide.
I don’t know what will happen with Customer Success in the next couple of years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime down the road we’re no longer talking about “Customer Success” as a separate function within a business, but simply as part of the way you do business.
Even today that’s how you should view it.
Why? Simply put; No Customer Success = No Your Success.
You make sure your customers are successful and they’ll make sure you’re successful.
On the flip-side, if your customers are not achieving “success” in their relationship with you, your success is at risk.
Of course, what “success” looks like for your customers is 100% unique to your customers, in the context of your product or service.
So while there’s not a one-size-fits-all definition of lower-case customer success – that’s up to you to know – as far as the concept of upper-case Customer Success is concerned, I’ve attempted to define that for you here.
Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.
