Why I am worried about customer success
I recently changed part of my LinkedIn profile adding the title “CS heretic”. People asked me why I am against CS and the answer is that nothing can be further from the truth. I have for many years believed passionately in the importance of customers as the focus for everything the organisation does. As CEO, it was central to how I built Clicktools, the SaaS company I founded in August 2000. My problem is with how too many B2B SaaS companies (my sole focus) go about delivering measurable results to the key roles in target customers, which is what customer success really is.
I am not alone. I have spoken to many CEOs, investors and quite a few CS leaders who agree that fundamental change is needed. Commenting on the challenges facing the tech industry in the last 18 months, David Kellog, serial entrepreneur and now Entrepreneur in Residence at Balderton Capital said; “While this bodes well for the customer success discipline, it does not automatically bode well for the customer success department.”
This concern is not new for me.
Back in Oct 2017, I was writing about the challenges facing customer success and what I think was needed in B2B SaaS; something I had been thinking about for a few years already. My starting point was to develop a charter for what I then called Customer Success 2.0 (CS2.0), what I now think of as customer-led-growth. I dropped the use of the phrase CS2.0 because I came to the conclusion that customer success, as we currently think about it is actually part of the problem and what is needed is a root and branch reinvention. Perpetuating the phrase customer success was just making solving the root cause problem more challenging. Trying to fit a different philosophy into the concept of customer success as people understand and practice it is impossible.
In the quest for sustainable, profitable growth, CEOs, CFOs, boards and investors intensified the focus on how different teams contribute; a challenge that will not disappear in the next couple of years. The simple fact is that CS does not influence much that is needed to deliver the measurable results to key customer roles that underpins retention and growth. They never can because as everyone says, CS is a company-wide philosophy.
There is a joke I like that is pertinent to this issue. A walker stops and asks a local for the directions to a pub. The local thinks and answers; “if I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here.” Given what we know know about CS, would we start at a different place. I think it is a much needed discussion. Hanging on to old concepts and approaches is holding companies back but legacy mindsets about CS are deeply ingrained. In the words of the economist John Maynard Keynes: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
And that is why I am worried and why, as Dave Kellog says I too am sceptical about the future of CS departments.
Below is the text of that original 2017 post.
“In thinking about what was wrong with customer success, I started with a simple premise: software should be easy to use and deliver the outcomes customers buy it for ‘out of the box’, without other interventions. When I started talking about this, some said it was idealistic and it was not possible. Everyone has customer support and increasingly, customer success teams: it’s accepted wisdom; best practice.
I don’t agree. I certainly don’t claim that product based customer success is easy but without lofty ambition, we all too often inflict bad software and unmet objectives on buyers the world over. As George Bernard Shaw once said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” I’ll stick to being unreasonable.
I sketched out the broad brush of CS2.0 in the following statements:
Product is the primary vehicle for delivering customer success. The need for a large CS team could indicate significant product shortfalls.
Product-led customer success guides and supports the customer in making the organisational changes they need (process and people) to best exploit your product.
Product/market fit is achieved when you have successful customers, not just buyers
A single view of the customer is a must have.
The CS metrics that really matters track the number, scale and speed of customers achieving their goals.
CS is built around a view of ideal customers common across the company.
Customer success is a quota carrying, revenue generating contributor to growth.
Not part of the core charter but, I noted “If the CEO doesn’t get customer success, the customer won’t!” I also added “It doesn’t matter what you call it; what matters is what you do.”
They are principles, perhaps with slightly different wordings that I will continue to agitate for in my role as CS heretic!