(WIP) What is Customer Success...

What is Customer Success?   This seems like such a simple question, but for many organizations and individuals, this something that they struggle to answer.  It takes pondering, planning and getting rid of deep seated norms within most organizations and being very honest with yourself.  

At it’s core, a customer is successful when they have achieved their expected benefit from your product or service AND continue to gain incrementally more value than originally anticipated.  

That is it, It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.  If the definition of “Customer Success” was a bowl of Wonton soup ,the definition above is that one big wonton you get in your bowl.  Sure there are a lot of other ingredients, but in the end, that is the payoff, the nut, the winner circle, etc.  

So lets break down the steps required to create the definition specifically to your product or service.   Lets use a few industry known products and services as examples and walk through the process as if we were going to be defining this for these organizations.

We will use both a product that is used at your location and also an “…As a service” type of product.  For our Product we can use something like a lawn mower from the hardware store.  For our SaaS (Software as a Service) based product lets use an example DropBox (online digital storage).  I think it will be an interesting exercise to also look at something that is a bit of a hybrid product and service in the Apple Watch.

We can start with the SaaS based example because it tends to be the easier of the 3 to view the benefit for the company (in this case DropBox).  So lets say Jimmy works for Dropbox and is tasked with ensuring that DropBox’s customers are successful, he is ultimately going to head up a customer success function within the company.  He has as understanding of what his product does, he has attended enough sales presentations that he understands how it is positioned to prospective buyers.  He is a user himself so he can articulate the value and does so with one of his friends over coffee.  

Jimmy starts by explaining that he stores all of his documents and spreadsheets that he needs for his personal use in the DropBox cloud.  He further explains to his friend that he no longer has to ensure it is backed up in the event that his laptop or computer dies.  by way of example, Jimmy logs onto the wifi network from his tablet in the coffee shop and opens up a document stored in his Dropbox cloud folder to show how it doesn’t require you to be at the location of your data, or on a single machine, but rather anywhere that is connected and online.  

Jimmy’s friend understands the value but he is nervous about how well protected the data is.  Jimmy recalls and conveys what he has learned through his companies sales organization on the security of the data and that all data is encrypted on transmission and that it is regularly backed up and has a hot swap data center to ensure redundancy.  

Through this dialogue, Jimmy was able to certainly explain what the company does and some of the value, but he still needs to define success for his task on the job.

Going back to our definition template, we are looking for benefit the customer is expecting to achieve by implementing this product.  To make it simple lets assume we are talking about individuals using the product rather than a company using the product to make it more relatable.  

Jimmy would have to go speak to some of the current DropBox customers to understand what it was that they expected to get out of the product.  He would benefit from also speaking to some people that use a competitive product and maybe chose that other product over DropBox.  This is crucial information to have in order to define “success” for the company he works for. 

Through his research, Jimmy builds an example profile of their users and their expected benefit.  He creates a persona to bring the example to life and allow him to illustrate and discuss this internally in his own organization.  He may not realize it yet, but he is about to run into a lot of hurdles internally in his own organization when he shares this information.  We will address thees pitfalls and things to watch out for in a future article. 

Consumer Profile:  Mary is looking at possibly using DropBox.  In her mind, she has read the marketing material and is looking forward to being able to access her data anywhere and not have to keep constant backups on her home computer.  She is excited about not having to remember to backup her data weekly and also about being free to work where she wants from whatever device is convenient.  

With this background information, Jimmy puts together his first draft of what Success is for this consumer profile.

Customer Success is when our customers have secure and protected access to their data on any device regardless of location for a price that they find fare and valuable.  

Now lets use the example of the lawn mower and we can assume it is a Murray brand (My perception is this is a low to middle price point mower at my local hardware store so fits our example).  For the sake of this discussion we will say it is a 22 inch wide push mower that is pull start and had a bagger to catch the grass clippings, but nothing overly fancy for the sake of our illustration.

Bruce works for Murray and he has reviewed the marketing material and knows that his mowers are reasonably priced, reliable, lightweight and at a lower price point in the market.  He has spoken to several customers and what they like about the product is that it is easy to push due to it’s weight, that it starts easy and that it is not hard to maintain.  He spoke to some customers that purchased other products and he knows a few of the reasons where because they wanted an electric start or auto drive or there was a perception that the product lacked quality due to the price point.

Bruce defines customer success as the point at which the customer has a mower that is at a price that they can afford and that the mower starts easily and cuts he grass smoothly and that the bag is easy to empty of clippings.  

It has a lot of stages, Onboarding, Deployment/Adoptoin, Steady state, Continous improvement (Repeat).  

One of the saddest things to see in the growing online Cloud based “_________As a Service” world we live in, is companies that know they need this function, fund and start one and never define what it really means, nor how they will go about presenting this to their internal and external customers.