Customer Success has a serious branding issue.
During its mainstream B2B adoption back in the late 2000's, the Customer Success Management team name was immediately recognizable for what its mission was. It was cool and novel; a sign of the changing times which acknowledged the shifting of power to the customer with the emergence of SaaS technologies. The Customer Success (CS) team was more than Account Management, because its purpose wasn't explicitly to sell - it was to help customers get the most of their relationship with the vendor and to improve retention. The intention was on point, and Customer Success Managers (CSMs) were enormously impactful in shifting customers to the rapidly emerging SaaS economy.
For a time, it worked. But as time went on, the customer success team, by virtue of its placement in the customer lifecycle, became a catch-all function. CSMs spent an increasing percentage of their energy reactively putting out fires that originated outside their immediate jurisdiction. The sheer velocity of hyper-growth-fueled-change created numerous gaps in the customer experience, and CSMs were deployed to plug the holes. By the mid 2010's, CS leaders recognized that delivering customer success was heavily dependent upon all aspects of the organization and the rally cry went out: Customer Success isn't just delivered by a team, it requires a whole-company effort.
And that admission was the start of the undoing of customer success teams.
Over the last several years, CS teams have struggled to articulate their full value to orgs, largely because the scope has grown exponentially. With increased scope, came increased confusion about the core mission, and CS programs began demonstrating wide variability of responsibilities across companies. This variety was heavily dictated by the maturity of the org and the commitment of the executive teams. This also further confused the general “Customer Success” message; CSM teams now came in numerous flavors, with multiple subteams, and expectations varied greatly. Customers became confused and frustrated that the CSMs from their various vendors offered such differing experiences.
As budgets contracted during the economic downturn over the last year, CSMs found themselves in a surprisingly vulnerable position. The core metrics that CSMs had been measured on were not closely aligned to top-line revenue and valuations. As a result, CFOs and boards viewed CSM teams as overhead and included them in broad layoffs to reduce costs. CSM leaders were unprepared to defend their costs because over the last 12 years of economic growth, they hadn't really needed to. The recent buzzy emergence of the "digital CSM", or "customer-success-at-scale", highlights the urgent need to deliver personalized customer management, but more cost-effectively.
Which brings us back to the branding.
Customer Success teams are struggling under the saddle of their own branding. Even original CS pioneers like Salesforce are quietly disbanding their CS teams. Because in today's world, it is better understood that delivering Customer Success isn't the job of a single team. It must be delivered by every function in a company.
"Customer Success" can no longer be synonymous with a team or a role. It is a macro outcome that the entire company must organize behind. Every team should be accountable for their role in making all customers successful. Customers have the best chance to achieve their desired outcomes with your product/service when the collective experience is designed to support this goal. Until foundational organizational changes are made to support this - such as company-wide OKRs focused on achieving customer outcomes, or compensation plans aligned to long-term customer retention - it's an uphill battle for CSMs.
Replacing "customer success" with a new branding won't be an easy task. It's deeply embedded in the SaaS economy lingo. Removing “success” from the naming could be perceived as a signal of failure; that making the customer successful is no longer the core mission. But holding on to an outdated misnomer isn’t serving the greater cause. We need CS leaders who are not just experts at QBRs and Health Scores. We need CS leaders who understand that delivering customer success cannot be completed from within the limits of the CSM team. CS leaders need to enhance their overall business acumen and be able to influence and partner well with each department across the company - from sales to marketing to product. CS leaders must recognize the confusion implied in their name and actively educate others about their mission and their value.
The solution is to empower CS leaders as architects of the broader customer journey. Armed with customer feedback, usage stats, and behavioral analysis, CS leaders are well positioned to identify what issues customers experience and then diagnose the root cause. Orgs should then redirect resources to addressing the upstream problem - not spend additional resources on reacting to the consequences of those problems. Said another way: Prevent the fires that overwhelm and dilute the CSMs focus from occurring in the first place. This approach is generally more cost-effective and certainly better for both the customer and the employees. By closing these holes in the customer’s experience, CSMs will once again be able to focus on their essential core mission - to proactively manage relationships and adoption - and not be fully responsible (in reality or in perception) for the ultimate success of the customer.
The unfortunate news for CSM teams is that this will require some sacrifice... and self-preservation will create some resistance. This means that during upcoming 2024 planning CS leaders will need to have the courage and discipline to give up some of their budget and direct their companies to invest in the existing upstream problems. Too many defects in releases? Strengthen your QA department rather than adding another CSM. Sales selling bad fit customers? Add more Sales Engineers or Sales Enablement. Too many support tickets? Figure out the leading causes of ticket creation and engineer them out of the product.
Customer expectations haven’t diminished, and delivering the same experience 2023 post-layoffs will be challenging. Most execs already know where the underlying issues lie, we’ve just become comfortable and reliant upon letting the CSMs handle the fallout. Unfortunately, many of those CSMs are no longer employed. As 2024 planning begins over the next few months, executives need to strongly consider allocating their precious investments into strengthening the overall customer experience.
"Customer Experience" is the next investment frontier: it transcends any particular interaction or team and looks at the sum of all parts. Experience is designed and produced by all departments (intentionally or unintentionally) to create outcomes for customers, which, in turn, drives positive business outcomes for the company. While Customer Success Managers undoubtedly play a pivotal role in delivering a robust experience, it's essential to acknowledge that they cannot shoulder the entire responsibility.
In the meantime, let's start brainstorming a better team name for "Customer Success Management" in today's business world and get them back on task. The outdated language is perpetuating an impossible expectation and will only continue to damage the intention of the branding.
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