Again and again, brands are discovering that customers choose, refer, and stand by a company based not on flashy marketing or innovative product features, but on the experience of engaging with the brand and the value that brand delivers.

Delivering this kind of loyalty-inspiring value and experience doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of intentionally – and passionately – adopting customer success as a core philosophy. The top brands have rabid fans because they infuse each and every aspect of their organization with this philosophy, ensuring that each customer experience is predictable, measurable, and consistently aligned with the customer’s perception of value.

Particularly relevant to the subscription-based business model and strategically suited to a competitive market, customer success is the only way for SaaS companies to build and maintain a sustainable hyper-growth business.

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is the process of integrating customer goals, context and outcomes into your company’s culture, vision, strategy and operations, so that your organization can increase visibility into customer needs. This insight enables you to develop a keen understanding of what your customers are striving to do, and then you can use this information to help them consistently realize the full value of your product over the course of their customer lifetime. The goal is for you and your customers to work in concert so that the relationship can develop to its full potential. The alternative – you and your customers working on separate tracks – weakens and jeopardizes the relationship.

Customer success transforms your relationship with your customer from being purely transactional to being deeply cooperative and collaborative. Customer success is about becoming a partner in your customer’s journey and helping them meet their business goals by enabling their success and proactively removing impediments along the way.

The end goal is for the customer to associate value in the relationship beyond your products and services, so the relationship endures the normal ups and downs of doing business.

Learn more about starting a customer success team and discover seven companies that are doing it right in our free eBook.