7 Ideas from Customer SuccessCon 2016

Last week I presented at the Customer SuccessCon conference in Berkeley, CA (about scaling customer success; please let me know if you’d like a copy of the presentation). I was also able to talk to dozens of customer success managers and came away with these thoughts:

Customer success organizations continue to have a very unsettled scope, which organizers characterized as a problem. I agree that scope is all over the place, but I do not see it as a problem, rather a normal characteristic of a new field that is still innovating and experimenting — a good place to be.
Customer success is almost always a cost center, which was presented as a weakness, and again I’m not sure it is. After all, software engineering organizations are all cost centers and no one thinks they are weak… The real issue is the lack of of a match between requirements and funding, not the status of the group.
Customer success organizations rarely have a staffing model. This is the real problem, behind the smoke screen of being a cost center. Beyond the old Jason Lemkin’s rule of thumb of one CSM for $2m in ARR, we should be able to calculate exactly what the average customer needs in terms of onboarding and retention effort, by customer segment. The customer retention cost is a metric just as important as the customer acquisition cost.
Too many customer success organizations are created to turn at-risk customers around — and do nothing but. This is sad since at-risk customers are very difficult to turn around, and may remain sour for the long run, but there is also a lot to learn from defections. I am planning a follow-up post on this topic for next month.
Customer success organizations have varying levels of influence on products, marketing campaigns, and sales activities. Of course, if they are busy saving hordes of at-risk customers, they won’t have time to be more strategic, and that’s too bad. Customer data can help identify the features (and bug fixes!) that really matter to existing customers, and they show which types of customers are the best fit for the long term.
All companies have data-quality problems. Start with what you have and align with the finance organization, which owns “the truth” when it comes to revenue.
Work with power-users. Of course customers’ executives are important partners for customer success managers, but power-users can close doors — and open new ones when they change employers. I think power-users are a grossly under-exploited resource.