3 Questions to Ask Before Investing in Customer Success

You know your business thrives by making customers more successful. And to do that, you know you need to be proactive. Gone are the days when companies could sit back and wait for customers to come to them with problems. With the rise of subscription software-as-a-service and more options available to them than ever, it doesn’t take long for unsatisfied customers to take their business elsewhere.

To stop that from happening, you’re considering investing in a customer success management solution to help your customers fully realize the value and promise of your software quicker and more effectively.

That’s great, but like any major investment (ex: marketing automation, CRM, etc.), it’s not a decision to be made lightly, and there are a variety of factors and prerequisites to consider.

To gain deeper insight, we asked Nick Mehta, CEO of customer success management solution Gainsight, to share his take on the big pieces companies need to have in place in order to make an investment in customer success truly worthwhile.

Watch him reveal the three questions you need to ask before investing in customer success, plus an additional takeaway for adopting the right experimental mindset in the videos below:

3 Questions to Ask Before Investing in Customer Success

Transcript

It’s interesting, because we have about 150 customers now at Gainsight, and as you go through that process, you learn who’s a good customer, what’s the right time [to invest in a customer success solution]. Frankly, we want to make our customers successful, so we want to get them at the right time when the right steps are already in place.

I think there are three important things you’ve got to think about if you’re implementing a customer success platform, three things to figure out before you actually buy and implement technology. It’s pretty simple. It’s why, what, and who.

1) Why are you doing this?

Now, that sounds kind of basic, but I think a lot of people will read a bunch of blog posts from people like us or from OpenView and say, “Okay, I want to do customer success.” But the question is: What are you trying to solve? Is it a churn problem? Is it a renewals problem? Is it an adoption problem? Do you feel like the lever to that is talking to your customers more? Is it about automation? [You] really [need to understand] why you’re doing this.

2) What are you trying to do?

This is where I’d really try to implement a process that we all see in the lean startup world — the minimum viable product (MVP). [Develop] an MVP for customer success technology. Do it in Excel. Build a little spreadsheet of what you’re trying to solve. Build your little dashboard of what you want to have, maybe your process flow. Figure that out before you even buy technology, because then you’ll be able to figure out [whether] you need technology and what’s the right thing.

3) Who is going to own and run customer success management?

This is like any software area. You probably make software yourself, but it’s not just about the technology. It’s actually about the person running it. Do you have somebody in your team who’s an operational leader? It could be the VP, it could be a CSM who is a power user, or it could be an ops person in customer success. [Regardless, it needs to be] somebody who really thinks about process, repeatability, and data. This cannot be a little part-time side thing for somebody. It’s a real full-time job. Just like you have somebody that runs your Salesforce or your CRM system, you need to think about who’s going to really run this day-to-day.

So focus on answering why, what, and who.

Keep in Mind: Customer Success is Still New (Nothing is Set in Stone Yet)

Transcript

New categories are always an evolution of an existing category. Big data was an evolution of statistics. Online marketing was an evolution of traditional marketing. In the same way, customer success is an evolution of things that have been around before like account management and customer support and services.

But it’s also pretty new in terms of the importance to the business model. So because of that, I would encourage people to really approach it like there’s no perfect idea out there and that anything should be in-bounds.

One of the biggest problems in business is we’ll hear ideas that might be really good and maybe they’re from people that are new or young, and we’ll just shut them down. “Hey, we’ve tried that before.” That’s one of the worst things you can say in a company. “We’ve tried that before,” or “That never works,” or “That didn’t work in 1985.” I think it’s really important, especially if you’re experienced, to actually harness the learnings from all the people that have never done this before, because they’re looking at it with a fresh set of eyes.

I think customer success is a great opportunity, because the way we’ve been doing this stuff for a while — account management and support — I don’t think it’s going to scale. I don’t think it works for the new world. I don’t think it works with the way people expect software to work.

So approaching this from a blank sheet of paper and maybe even putting people into the role that have not done it before, but are just really smart and constructive and creative in the way they think about things — I’d encourage companies to put new people into these roles and help them learn on the job, because it’s a new area.

Photo by: Wil Stewart