The Customer Success Economy

13Support: Go from Reactive to Proactive

You might be staring at this chapter title with skepticism. In fact, if you're like us, you may immediately be thinking of your least favorite support experience with your least favorite consumer brand. And you probably would come up with a number of words to describe that scenario before you suggested the term proactive. Historically, that poor perception of customer support has been appropriate.

In the age before recurring revenue business models, Support teams were often the only ones thinking about the client after the purchase. The client would be sold a multimillion-dollar contract and an implementation package, only later to escalate to the Support team because they weren't getting value. That escalation would be leveraged as an opportunity to sell the client a lucrative support maintenance contract, which was essentially a way for the vendor to get the client to pay for when they escalated.

In the new Age of the Customer, as we've discussed, vendors have become much more proactive in ensuring that clients get value. Many of the people who grew up in those reactive Support organizations are now excited to build and lead Customer Success teams in order to solve the root causes behind the flurry of escalations that once defined their working lives. The question becomes, What happens to the Support team in a world where proactivity is paramount?

The first CSM teams were often Support teams that were reconfigured in two ways: (1) ...