Shankar Sahai, the co-founder of InfoIvy, writes about the framework of customer success and the salient features that make it a prospect for future employees and employers.
Most of us can recall everything we purchased or sold as a product. It may be a TV for a home buyer or an air conditioner for a commercial property. Services have taken the role of products in the digital era. SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, gained popularity as services were developed and implemented using the software. Zipcar turned a product like a car into a service with a monthly subscription, while a restaurant that only sold meals when you called in started delivering food on UberEats or Zomato.
Today, we will look at Customer Success, a term that emerged in SaaS companies only a few years ago. Customer Success in the SaaS industry can be measured in several ways. In general, it’s a company culture or ideology centered on your customers and making sure they get the most value from your products. Customer success guarantees that your customers are using and reaping the benefits of your offerings.
Customer Support Representatives assisted customers over the phone, whereas Account/Relationship Managers helped upsell products. These divisions’ sole purpose was to keep customers satisfied. A lot has changed since then. Customers have higher expectations nowadays and so in particular to gain a positive experience every time they use the SaaS service and the desired results for which they have paid. They expect to be informed about new service features before they are released and know how to integrate service components into their procedures, business strategy, and day-to-day operations. And the Customer Success team is liable for all of these commitments.
Companies are sometimes astonished when clients leave because they blindly believe “customers are happy.” The clients who never appear to be happy are frequently the most successful. They’re constantly putting pressure on the service provider, and their expectations continually increase. Those clients are the ones who frequently file support tickets and request new features. They are the most influential promoters of your company since they educate others about you and your services and how well you perform.
Meanwhile, delighted customers may not be getting the results they want. They will churn as a result of this. However, since they are highly reticent, you will never know their degree of happiness or the reasons for closing the business deal.
Hence, to be clear, Customer Success isn’t about making customers happy. The Customer Success team is a unique combination of customer care and sales roles. Their primary objective is to assist clients from the sales pipeline (prospects) to the support pipeline (active users). Customer satisfaction is concerned with the pleasure quotient, whereas customer success is involved with improving the client’s bond with the organization. On the other hand, customer happiness is proactive, but customer success is argued by nature.
Happiness is, of course, desirable in a personal sense. That’s not what I’m saying; you don’t want to make your customers angry or give them a negative experience. In reality, you must work hard to make the methodology and experience as comfortable as possible. This may seem like semantics (wordplay) – happy vs. successful –, but you need to look at things the right way if you want to have an honest picture of your customer’s wellbeing.
Customer success is a fast-growing profession in various industries, including the United States, Europe, and India. Customer Success Manager openings in prominent blue-chip organizations abound on job sites. Customer Success Managers were ranked the third most promising career on LinkedIn in 2018, and the demand for CSMs has only grown since then. That’s fantastic news! A profession as a Customer Success Manager, on the other hand, is not supported by any schools or degrees (CSM). A few paid online training programs will only guide you through the jargon and acronyms used in this fast-growing industry.
We believe that anyone interested in a career in Customer Success must contact firms like InfoIvy. Industry veterans manage InfoIvy with years of experience as CSMs. They apply what they’ve learned in the real world to cut through the distractions and focus on what matters. There will be no jargon from the classroom, only information that the aspirant may use to ace interviews, work with customers, stand out, and get that well-deserved promotion. InfoIvy will help you gradually progress while maintaining long-term relationships with the individuals that matter most to you: your customers.
To get in touch, send an email to info@infoivy.com or go to https://biz.infoivy.com.
