The Customer Catalyst

CHAPTER 6SUCCESS

Success breeds success

C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS

• The Customer Success Manager (CSM) plays a critical role in ensuring cross-functional alignment around the customer. This is because customers are demanding ever slicker, more integrated experiences. Hence, the CEOs and leaders should increasingly redirect investments from sales into Customer Success to drive sustainable business growth.
• The role of the CSM is evolving from merely a post-sales function. The CSM is now responsible for ensuring a successful customer experience across the entire customer lifecycle – even before the customer has bought anything from the respective organisation, and especially during the onboarding and implementation phases. The CSM role is also valid in both B2B and B2C environments.
• CSMs should be incentivised and compensated first on successful customer outcomes, and second on securing customer renewals. They should not be given sales incentive targets as this drives the wrong behaviours.

Customer Success, like all aspects of the C-change growth engine, serves to drive sustainable business growth. According to Wikipedia (see Figure 6.1):

FIGURE 6.1 Definition of Customer Success.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_success

‘Customer Success is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a vendor and its customers. The goal of Customer ...