Customer Success

Chapter 9

Law 5: You Can No Longer Build Loyalty through Personal Relationships

Author: Bernie Kassar, Senior Vice President of Customer Success and Services, Mixpanel

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Executive Summary

Vendors today realize that they need to systematically create programs that allow for interaction between them and their customers. Most will need to address how to service the largest portion of their customer base in a technically friendly way while reducing the need for human capital–intensive ways of building relationships. This large portion of customers are usually lower-value customers in terms of annual spend commitment, but they are important for overall growth. This is not to say that you will eliminate the need for personal relationships with your customers; it just dictates a need to develop different programs that fit each segment of your customer base accordingly. This has to be done without losing the strong connection between customer and vendor that ultimately breeds loyalty, and changes what is known as a customer–vendor relationship into a mutual partnership.

Depending on your product and service, you will need to decide how to create a customer experience that develops a connection with your company. Once outlined, that customer experience needs to be captured, driven, and continually refined by your customer success team and practices. However, customer experience ...