Digital Customer Success

3Digital Customer Success Is a Strategic Program

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness….

—From A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Why should you care about Digital CS?

Because Customer Success, as companies have been practicing it for the past 10 years, is no longer sustainable. We don't pretend to know exactly where the market is headed, but we do know that the age of growth at any cost has been supplanted by the age of durable growth. Prior to 2020, the typical CS organization scaled by throwing bodies at the challenge. It didn't matter if your company was profitable, as long as you were acquiring more customers. Today, as SaaS firms race to keep up with swiftly changing technology (especially AI) and consumer preferences, durable profits and durable growth are the yardsticks that investors use to calculate valuations and measure a company's success. If you're not profitable, forget about a high valuation.

But if CS is to serve as a durable growth engine, it must become much more efficient. And it must do that by incorporating automated processes and systems.

The subscription revenue companies that successfully deploy a Digital Customer Success (CS) approach—the companies that view CS as a revenue driver; create a CCO role; create alignment between CS, Sales, and Product; and move ...