Customer Success

Customer Success and Customer Support are both important functions within an organization, but they have distinct roles and objectives however these two terms are seen to be interchangeable in todays day and age. One of the prime examples are how jobs are posted on LinkedIn and how roles around support, client support and after sales support are incorrectly featured as Customer Success. Infact “Success” as a term has gathered a bit of traction where you even see HR roles being rebranded as People Success or Employee Success role. This article seeks to clarify the difference between Customer Success, a role pioneered by the advent of SaaS Models and Customer Support, a function that has been in existence for a long time now.

Customer Success today forms the back- bone of the SaaS enterprise handling around 60 percent to 80 percent of revenues, depending on the growth stage of the firm. It also serves as a vital bridge between the internal functions (product, sales, marketing) and the Customers. For a firm to scale its business and operations, the Customer Success function must lay down processes and drive the required behavior. Since Customer Success is a new-age function and is sometimes seen from the lens of customer service and support, the founders are also primed to see the function from the same view point which can prove detrimental to the firms growth. Hence, the role of the function must be seen in the light of its capability to augment the firm in its quest towards rapid growth and sustainability.

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become one of the most critical models of software deployment within firms. As per the Boston Consulting Group, SaaS represented about 28% of the total enterprise software market and that number is expected to reach 45% by 2023. With this tremendous pace of growth, there are added challenges posed within a SaaS firm to maintain their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), retention cost and growth cost. In order to optimize all of these, its imperative to scale operations and Customer Success as a function plays an important role in meeting these cost objectives. This article dived into the design principles and methodology on how the Customer Success has to scale to maintain the highest levels of customer engagement