The Customer Success Economy

2Customer Success: It's Not Just for Silicon Valley

In The Third Wave, Steve Case's bestselling 2016 book, the former CEO and chairman of America Online (AOL) predicted the rise of regions outside of Silicon Valley as technology became infused in more-established industries. The same trend that is pushing “digital transformation” everywhere is also creating the need for Customer Success.

As an example of Case's observation, consider Rockwell Automation. Founded in 1903 and headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rockwell originally produced motor controllers for industrial cranes. Today, over 22,000 employees work to achieve the company's mission to “bring the Connected Enterprise to life,” according to its website, through products ranging from process controls, to sensors, to safety systems. Customer Success has been fundamental to Rockwell's transformation. In particular, it has helped Rockwell transform the “services” that they sell around equipment maintenance and management from a reactive model to a more proactive one.

Nicholas Goebel, director of Global Customer Success at Rockwell Automation, explains how that happened at their firm: “We realized as a services organization that our contracts and our annual recurring revenue are the keys to our future success. We needed to have a Customer Success organization in place to drive our renewal rates. So we made organizational changes,” says Goebel. “We recognized that the real goal of the CS organization at Rockwell Automation ...