Create Mutual Success
Within the SaaS business world, Customer Success (CS) has emerged as a vital component for sustainable growth and customer satisfaction. This has only been emphasised as funding has become more expensive for investors with executives and company boards becoming hyper-aware of the cost of new business acquisition and the potential growth within their current client base.
However, my recent experience in several SaaS businesses has given me a new approach to conventional post-sales service. The approach now is to have an openly value-driven -- as opposed to a profit-driven -- client relationship focus. I take on a holistic commitment to ensuring customers receive tangible value from their investments and efforts with my technology.
This shift in focus of CS emphasises a balance between a company's revenue goals and the client's objectives. This ensures mutually beneficial outcomes and allows for a long and productive relationship. The changes are subtle but can make a huge difference.
Reviewing the Purpose of Customer Success
Focusing CS to be more value-driven goes beyond the traditional boundaries of customer service. Firstly, holistic CS has an integral role throughout the entire customer lifecycle – from the pre-sales phase through to onboarding and renewals. Secondly, an effective CS strategy brings alignment between business success and customer achievements.
A value-driven CS approach focuses on:
Setting clear expectations focused on mutual success.
Fostering deep relationships.
Striving to deliver success metrics that align with customer value.
Setting clear expectations focused on mutual success
A value-driven CS approach that is focused on mutual success includes advocating for customers internally and encouraging those same customers to highlight their successful partnership through endorsements of your business’s services to their community. With expectations not only being given to you as the supplier, this allows your clients to understand how they can also help you as a business. You will find many of your clients are keen to support your business to succeed but mostly only if they have a person they trust asking.
Fostering deep relationships leads to mutual success
One of the most basic and effective ways to foster a deeper relationship with your customers is to focus on trust when you communicate. To build trust with your customers, emphasise transparency, personalised engagement, and proactive support. Acknowledge that no business is perfect; when a promise or expectation is missed, address it head-on. Apologise sincerely, explain what went wrong, and outline clear steps to rectify the situation. Use data to understand and cater to individual customer needs, and implement feedback loops to show their input is valued. In many situations, you can reduce frustration early by using technology for predictive issue resolution. Consistently communicate openly and meet your realistic expectations to demonstrate reliability.
By owning up to mistakes and taking decisive action to correct them, trust is maintained and even strengthened through the demonstration of accountability and commitment to service delivery.
Setting success metrics and communicating customer success
Measuring CS involves looking at the customer’s perception of success and the tangible contributions of the CS team towards that success. Setting clear objectives with outcomes the CS team can directly influence, as well as providing a definition of measurable improvement, allows both the executive team and the CS team to see the impact of the work with customers.
One example of measurable success and impact is the number of positive references or client advocates secured in a given period of time. This can only be achieved through the fostering of strong customer relationships and the development of trust. Communicating the successes gained, both internally and to the clients, ensures they are aware of the value being added to the business, or offered to the client.
Creating key resources for effective customer success
For CS to be impactful, there is also a need for some basic, clear and well-defined resources. These will include a shared vision that resonates with both the business and its customers, adaptable value statements tailored to segments of your clients, and a maturity model that maps to real customer data. Additionally, an emphasis on customisable training programs, with tracking, to measure value and efficiency metrics will allow you to understand the balance between impact and cost to the business. Finally, having your clients’ segments mapped to proactive and scheduled touch points is key. Assessment of the technology, data points and headcount should be driven by these resources.
Balancing revenue goals with customer objectives
A critical aspect of this value-driven approach to CS involves balancing the company’s revenue goals with the client’s ambitions – or measures of success. This balance ensures that, while pursuing profit is essential, it never overshadows the need to deliver real value to clients. Delivering lasting value to clients and developing meaningful relationships that lead to client advocates are vital actions that contribute to meeting a company’s revenue goals.
Using the discussed principles above you may run into the situation of a client not adding enough value back to your business. This can sometimes be hard to identify as it should not just be a calculation based on the client spend versus client cost. Rather, it is key to consider all the ways clients add value to your business. At this time, it is the responsibility of CS to identify the risk of overservicing and then providing clear communication with business leadership as to recommended action. Unfortunately, in some rare situations and after options have been explored, there is such thing as “good client churn”. Without acknowledging this, you will have a single or small subset of clients who compromise your ability to hit SLAs, KPIs and build advocates across your whole business. This is a huge topic on its own but when managed well can be revolutionary to your business
Taking a compr.ehensive approach to customer success
While I recognise there are many SaaS businesses already having great success with these or similar strategies, I do believe there is more to be done in formalising effective Customer Success practices in businesses. CS is effective when you can create intrinsic alignment between the success of the business and the success of the customer. This requires a shift from the executive level viewing customers as merely revenue streams and instead seeing their potential as partners towards achieving growth and success together. By adopting the approaches described in this article, businesses can realise the full potential of Customer Success, creating a scenario where the growth and satisfaction of the customer directly contributes to the company's success.
Customer Success should no longer be seen as just a modification of a long-standing business function (customer service) but a transformation of how a company interacts and engages with its customers driving toward mutual success. Businesses can harness the power of holistic Customer Success across post-sales to foster value-driven relationships that benefit both the company and its clients.
I strongly believe in Customer Success's significant impact across SaaS businesses, not just in post-sales. Have you seen holistic, value-driven Customer Success strategies benefit your business? Please share in the comments below. And if you’d like to discuss this journey with your teams, please connect with me.