From San Diego, customer success ideas

Continuing on what I learned at TSW (post 1 here), here are some customer success-specific ideas:

• Customer success is not about happy customers. It’s about customers perceiving value. Amen! and it’s not about “delighted” customers either…Only 25% of members use analytics to predict churn. We need to do better, no?
• 50% of members monetize (i.e. charge for) customer success. This was a stunner for me. Isn’t the whole point of customer success to make it available to all customers? Perhaps this is only a reflection that, for complex products, training and consulting are fee-based, which is eminently reasonable.
• 20% of customer success organizations report into Sales; 30% report to services; others report to a C-level executive. I think this means, essentially, nothing. Customer success is a new field and is still finding its legs and rules.

Coming up in the next post: questions (and attempted answers).

Have thoughts about customer success? Share them in the comments.