What is Customer Success?
Customer Success refers to the approach that has your company in a position where it ensures that each customer is successfully connected to their desired outcome.
The field may have evolved to be what we know as “customer success” today during 2000s, but the concept arrived in 1960s with customer support through call centers and emails.
And at the start of 2000s, the first CRM was invented and a new approach to customer success has developed. Customer Experience (CX) was more in spotlight, referring to offering better experiences to end-users of products.
Improved CX proved to increase customers’ likelihood to stay with the business. This fact alone led SaaS and many subscription-based businesses to start Customer Success Departments to improve CX.
Why is Customer Success important?
The success of every SaaS business is assuredly related to its capability of retaining customers and creating recurring revenue.
So, it is vital to have customers sticking around. That’s the whole reason customer success exists.
There is no doubt that a customer who has achieved the goals they set out to achieve in the first place will keep using the said product. Another search for a new and a better alternative won’t be necessary, as the current product will deliver what they need. One could say that as long as a customer succeeds, they won’t churn.
Pushing and directing customers to success is extremely crucial for this outcome. Most companies have customer success representatives that do 1on1 meetings, webinars, and explainer videos for their customers in order to help them be successful with the product.
A customer doesn’t hold much value to sales and marketing teams, as they’ve already acquired the customer. Especially in SaaS and subscription-based products, customer success and product teams has to ensure that a user keeps paying each month. As they direct users to success, they improve churn and increase retention rates.
What does a Customer Success Manager do?
A customer success manager is primarily responsible for improving the Customer Experience (CX) and ensuring that the connections the brand establishes with users is much more solid.
Across different industries, a customer success manager is responsible to:
- Create a channel for customer support conversations,
- Engage in customer support conversations related to product and technical issues,
- Follow up on every conversation to ensure customers’ success,
- Reach out to customers that are off the usual user journey to check on them,
- Provide valuable insights to existing customers through customer success meetings, webinars, videos, guides, and articles.
Though duties of a customer success manager might vary across industries, even companies, basic responsibilities stay the same, as well as the required skills.
Usually, customer success managers are required to be eligible to “manage”. They’ll often have a team of representatives that they need to organize in reaching out to customers and responding to them.
They are also required to be potent in analytics, at least in keeping and reading basic data structures. Along with managing individual conversations, they’ll need to gather actionable statistics from them for the product and marketing team to act on.
And lastly, they need to be knowledgable in the industry that they are interested to work in. They should have an existing information about the market, the product, and the audience to get started.
