By Pat Phelan, Brandwatch
I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be involved in Customer Success. It’s an incredibly dynamic, diverse discipline with significant challenges, significant opportunity and significant responsibility as Customer Lifetime Value becomes more and more of a key metric in SaaS world.
As the discipline evolves, so too our thinking toward it has to evolve and I believe that there are some key areas that any dynamic Customer Success Organisation needs to focus on.
Focus on Retention not Upsell.
If you have a leaky bucket you have two choices 1) You can increase the rate you fill the bucket to compensate for the leak or 2) you can fix the hole. It’s always surprised me how many organisations focus on Option 1. I believe Net Retention is a vanity metric. In a high growth organisation, upsell can mask major customer retention issues and indeed it can paint a rosy picture until the growth plateaus and the leak is still there, then the scramble begins. In a successful customer success management organisation there are three core areas;
