J B Wood Todd Hewlin Thomas Lah Popular Books

J B Wood Todd Hewlin Thomas Lah Biography & Facts

Customer success, customer success management, or client advocacy is a business strategy aimed at ensuring that customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a product or service. It involves proactive engagement, personalized support, and ongoing assistance to help customers derive maximum value from their investments. refers to the process of enhancing customers' satisfaction while using a product or service. As a specialized form of customer relationship management, customer success management focuses on implementing strategies that result in reduced customer churn and increased up-sell opportunities. The primary objective of customer success is to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product or service, consequently leading to improved customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company. Customer success has become increasingly integral to modern businesses across various industries, with dedicated teams and specialized tools emerging to support its implementation and execution. Metrics Key sub-functions Customer success (CS) teams perform several key functions, which include: Technical enablement The scope and level of effort (LOE) for technical enablement can vary greatly, ranging from a few hours to many person-years. Almost every software solution, and generally any innovation, requires some level of initial setup and enablement. This activity is also referred to as Initial Implementation or Customer Onboarding and Initial Engagement. This step typically follows the initial sale of the solution and any add-on components, and is often governed by a statement of work (SOW) defining the deliverables, timeframe, and commercial structure for the engagement. In many organizations, the team responsible for this function is referred to as professional services. Knowledge enablement Knowledge enablement involves providing customers with the knowledge needed to make the best use of the solution, which can sometimes be a separate function from technical enablement. Formal and informal training, customer-to-customer relations (such as community sites), and self-service knowledge systems are all part of this function. Identifying growth opportunities During the contract lifecycle, the customer success manager (CSM) has direct access to conversations related to the client's business growth. As a "trusted adviser", it is a key function of the CSM role to identify expansion opportunities, either in terms of feature or function expansion. Identifying churn risk Utilizing a customer health score is crucial for identifying churn (or lost revenue). As the main point of contact for accounts, the CSM has visibility into the possibility of churn or canceled accounts. The CSM can intervene when needed to help decrease the likelihood of a lost account. Key tools Customer relationship management platforms CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Hubspot etc. Customer success platforms CSP platforms such as Gainsight, Totango, Planhat, etc. Value management platforms Value management platforms such as Intelo.ai goes beyond CSPs to work in CRMS and project management platforms to enable customer success. General account management Although customer success is a more comprehensive approach to account management, a significant portion of the day-to-day responsibilities falls under the "account management" title. The CS team manages the business relationship between the customer and the provider. This function works in parallel with the technical teams and collaborates with the customer to ensure they best utilize the provider's capabilities, as well as expand and improve them. The team works to increase adoption of the solution, ensure contract renewal and expansion, and manage executive relations, which includes acting as an advocate for the customer to various groups within an organization. Customer success managers Presently, the customer success function within most organizations is embodied in the customer success manager (CSM), client relationship manager (CRM), or client strategy consultant (CSC) job titles. Customer success managers (CSM) act as the main point of contact and as a trusted advisor for the customer from the vendor side as they are the ones ultimately responsible and accountable for that customer's success. The function may share many of the same functions of traditional account managers, relationship managers, project managers, and technical account managers, but their mode of operations tend to be much more focused on long-term value-generation to the customer. At its heart, it is about maximizing the value the customer generates from utilizing the solutions of the vendor, while enabling the vendor the ability to derive high return from the customer value. To enable that, the CSM must monitor the customer's usage of and satisfaction from the solutions of the vendor, identify opportunities and challenges from the way the customer engages with the solution and take action to help resolve challenges and foster expansion of the usage as well as the value from the solutions (to both sides) over time. As a consequence, relentlessly monitoring and managing the customer health is a key success factor for every CSM as well as the need to deeply understand the drivers of value the customer gains from the solutions provided by the vendor. Without such deep and timely understanding of these two aspects of the customer, the CSM would not be able to act effectively. In young organizations where the total number of employees (and customers) is small, the CSM may be the first employee of the customer success team. As such, they will be responsible for most of the functions described above, which over time may be fulfilled by more specialized team members. Ownership of commercial responsibilities by CSM vary among companies. While some believe a CSM's neutrality from sales or commercial conversations may make a customer more likely to respond to and engage with a CSM, others view the ownership of the commercial relations as natural to a long-term relationship between a vendor and a customer and more empowering to the CSM. For CSMs to fulfill the responsibilities of their role, they must be empowered by an organization's executive team to navigate freely among all parts of an organization. This maintains the CSMs credibility with the customer as an effective resource. In organizations where CSMs are just another level of abstraction or a "screen" between the customer and the resources they need, the credibility of the CSM is compromised and the customer experience eroded which may result in a customer not renewing or expanding their business with the vendor. Furthermore, lacking the top-down support will deprive the CSM the ability to garner the right resources needed by them to complete their jobs. Virtual customer success managers (VCSM) Virtual customer success managers are remote points of contact for customers and monitor the success of customers, pr.... Discover the J B Wood Todd Hewlin Thomas Lah popular books. Find the top 100 most popular J B Wood Todd Hewlin Thomas Lah books.