Customer Success: Play to Win

Part of the Customer Success Summit On-Demand Series

Customer Success is taking off and has grown beyond being just a function within many organizations. For the last couple of years the industry has gone through several phases of understanding. First looking at why we need customer success, then to what is customer success and finally now to how do we go about implementing best in class customer success.

In this new phase where we talk about how to implement best in class Customer Success, what we really must ask ourselves is what are we trying to accomplish? What is the end game that we are striving for? In a recent study, what was found is that for most companies (79%) the main goal is about reducing churn. Now that’s a fantastic goal but it can end up limiting Customer Success organizations because it leads to very defensive tactics and strategies.

CEO and Co-Founder of Totango, Guy Nirpaz, talked to the audience at Customer Success Summit about how we as an industry can move from a defensive position to executing on a more offensive strategy. When we put all our focus and most of our efforts on fighting churn we are playing not to loose, by focusing on driving innovation and growth we are playing to win.

Playing to win has 3 main components:

Customer Success Innovation: building out unique and amazing customer experiences that raise the bar across the industry. One example of this is anticipating a customer’s needs before they even know they need it and offering them the right solution at the right time.

Focus on Growth: Rather than simply reducing churn look at new ways that you can grow customer lifetime value both in their experience but also in company revenue. This can be adding new services, adding additional users or simply increasing the number of times that a customer uses our service.

Celebrate Success: When we focus on simply reducing churn and “saving” customers it’s hard to remember the incredible customer success can have across the business. Focusing on innovation and growth gives us opportunity to celebrate how we make a difference.

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Customer Success: Play to Win