What is Customer Success Management?

Let’s understand Customer Success Management and why it exists.

Posted by Sumit Kumar Uzir, Certified CSM

Customer Success Management is enabling a Customer or a Consumer to achieve their Business Goals and Objectives via your offerings.

It is also important to remember that Customer Success teams exist to make customers successful, and success should be defined and governed by an ideal customer’s definition of success.

Why does Customer Success Management Exist?

There have been some drastic changes to the way businesses operated and focussed since the Product Era. There wasn’t much that was in focus in terms of making customers successful in this era. A majority of the companies had a Customer Support Team to make the customers happy during this time.

We are currently in the “Era of Engagement” and the scenarios have totally changed due to the innovation in mobile and cloud technologies. Due to this, the barriers of entry have reduced which led to more players in the market, replaced outdated on-prem technologies & costs, shift to subscription business models and so much more.

As we shifted to a Subscription economy with low switching costs it has become immensely crucial to keep healthy, happy and satisfied subscribers to sustain. And, this is why growth in a subscription business is not only seen based on the number of new acquisitions but the total number of subscribers you have for retention and renewals.

Right, so having a team to ensure that you have a good Customer Happiness Score is not just to give you a competitive advantage, it is rather a central move to business sustenance in a subscription economy.

Pillars of Customer Success Management

Enhance Customer Experience: It is always a great idea to provide great customer experiences along with product delivery. Say, you are a CRM company and you are providing your product and services at very aggressive pricing. The product seems to do the work end-to-end, but if customers struggle to get training materials, handbooks or any sort of assistance from your employees. That customer is likely to churn at the end of their contract lifecycle

Customer Engagement: Customer Success Management is only possible if both the customer and the CSM team are involved in the process right from Onboarding to the Nurture Phase. From my experience, we always had a good happiness score whenever we had a good collaboration with the customer in the Customer Success Processes.

Organizational wide Adjustment: Customer Success Management needs an organization-wide adjustment. It is considered a best practice for internal teams to be focussed on helping each other and work as a living organism to prioritize Customer Success.

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What is Customer Success Management?

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