At Pardot, one of the areas where we really excelled was customer success. Back then, we referred to customer success as client advocacy, but the idea was the same: proactively help our customers have a great experience. Customer success is one of the most important functions, yet not as well understood as other functions.
Here are a few thoughts on customer success:
- Implement a customer success platform to ensure consistent and efficient customer interaction as well as customer analytics (Need a product? Check out Trustfuel)
- Develop a cadence around on-boarding, regular outreach, and renewal period
- Build a pipeline for the customer success team through sales development reps that are a great culture fit but choose not to go in sales as well as support reps that want to proactively help customers
- Decide who’s going to handle up-selling and cross-selling as it’s not usually the same skill set as a customer success manager
- Scale the customer success team as the number of customers grows (depending on the type of customer, one benchmark is one customer success manager (CSM) for every $1 million in annual recurring revenue)
Remember that with Software-as-a-Service, the “service” is just as important as the “software.” Customer success is critically important.
What else? What are some more thoughts on the importance of customer success?
David Cummings on Startups 