DRIVE FOR CLIENT SUCCESS
Customer success has always been important for enterprise software providers. Over the past year, the tenor around customer success has taken on a sense of urgency, with over 70% of top software providers stating that it has become a top priority.
Four key customer success priorities that providers should execute on immediately.
As product portfolios have become increasingly diverse and complex, so too have customer engagement models. Growth of product SKUs, M&A, multiple deployment options (on-premise, SaaS, dedicated hosted), and standalone support and service offers have all contributed to nuanced customer engagement models and, often, a fragmented customer experience. The charter and accountabilities of the various customer-facing roles are not clearly defined, such as those for account managers, technical account managers, and customer success managers. Mapping end-to-end customer workflows and specifying the responsibilities and hand-offs across the various roles are both integral to delivering a completely integrated customer experience. Such mapping has implications on organizational structure, including where these roles reside and the metrics by which they are measured.
Knowledge of your customers’ business drivers is a pre-requisite to driving their success. That said, capturing your customers’ key performance indicators (KPIs), measuring them, and monitoring your solution’s impact is challenging. As a starting point, providers should leverage available product usage, adoption, engagement, and referral metrics as a proxy for success.
A number of listening posts exist that providers can mine to get a 360-degree view of their customers. These include sales calls, support interaction, marketing webinars, user forums, training participation, NPS surveys, social chatter, executive meetings, product usage data, etc. Furthermore, a number of technology platforms have recently emerged to help gather these metrics, create sophisticated customer success dashboards, and enable workflows to improve customer experience, reduce churn risk, and drive upsell.
Providers tend to underleverage these listening posts, hampering their ability to truly “know” their customers. Using Net Promoter Score (NPS) alone is not sufficient. Instead, providers should invest in efforts to get a comprehensive view of their customers.
Traditionally, the majority of services revenue for an enterprise software company is generated by the implementation of core products. Today, providers are under intense pressure from customers to implement their solutions more quickly and economically. To respond, providers must take a hard look at their processes to identify opportunities to automate and accelerate service delivery. In parallel, enterprise software providers should consider offering more product-independent (but related) services, such as revitalization, adoption, optimization, and value realization services, to compensate for the decrease in core implementation services. These services not only drive product-independent services revenue, but they also help ensure customers adopt more of the product and derive value from it.
While putting in place an effective customer success capability is important, the ability to scale effectively and efficiently is essential. There are three areas where technology plays a key role in enabling scale:
Below is an overview of the current customer success technology landscape and an example list of platforms that play a role in enabling customer success. It is imperative that software providers define their technology strategy to achieve scale in delivering customer success.
Act Now
Customer success is top of mind throughout the software industry for a reason. The industry’s shifting market dynamics are compelling company leaders to reevaluate their business models. Providers that act now to implement a thoughtful, integrated approach to customer success will be well positioned to identify and capitalize on new revenue and growth opportunities.