“The term Customer Success has become a buzzword in today's business world.”
The statement that I wrote four years ago to begin the foreword of Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue now seems antiquated in 2020. After all, Customer Success is light years past buzzword status these days.
In 2016, most people in the business world, even those in cutting-edge, pure-play SaaS companies, were unfamiliar with the concept of Customer Success. It was crystal clear that the economy was rapidly changing. The old model of customer service—reactive, costly, bare-minimum customer service—was no longer going to work now that customers were holding all the cards.
Nick, Dan, and Lincoln's book was the perfect book at the perfect time. It gave forward-thinking leaders a blueprint to adapting to the changing market. It taught them the necessity of Customer Success as a strategy and an organizational function. It gave them the tools to create a Customer Success Management team from scratch and to lay a path to grow their careers in an emerging field.
Four years later, dog-eared copies of that book are on the desks of tens of thousands of leaders and practitioners of Customer Success around the globe. I've even seen it on several CEOs' shelves! It's been translated into four languages and has helped fuel a movement that's become one of the fastest-growing emerging jobs on the planet. There's a pretty simple reason for it: churn.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, Customer Success was focused on two deeply intertwined topics: “Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue.” It was about staving off the silent killer of subscription businesses and developing a defensive strategy.
In 2016, most people still didn't understand Customer Success beyond customer service. Where customer service is a necessary but reactive aspect of customers successfully using a product, Customer Success involves a more holistic understanding of a customer's business objectives. If you were in Customer Success four years ago, it's easy to imagine you spent a lot of time just explaining your job and its value.
Today, nobody needs to be convinced of the value the customers create for their business or the business imperative of proactively nurturing and deepening those relationships. But what's the next step? Why this new book? Why now?
It's become clear that too many businesses stopped reading after “Reducing Churn.” The conversation ended with, “I'm not selling anything.” In far too many cases, they stopped at Customer Success Management.
As Nick and Allison make the case in this book, Customer Success has a second phase of evolution that goes far beyond churn and far beyond CSM. In this new evolution, Customer Success is infused into every part of your company and is fulfilled in every interaction between every team member and customer—at every level.
Customer Success 2.0 isn't a defensive strategy. It's all about the offense—unlocking your customer's huge, hidden growth potential through people, processes, and technology built for 2020 and beyond.
There's a quote from Steve Jobs that I love: “You have to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can't start with the technology and figure out where you are going to try to sell it.”
I think the same is true with books as well—you have to start with the reader and work backward to the book. In 2016, the reader was a Customer Success neophyte, likely learning about the need for a new way of business for the first time. But in 2020, the reader of Customer Success 2.0 already knows the imperative. They know how to run a CSM team. They know how to fight churn.
But they need to know how to scale Customer Success across the entire organization; how to go from Customer Success to customer growth; how to build Customer Success into the product itself; how to unify customer data; and most importantly, how to bring humanity back into technology.
I look forward to seeing well-worn copies of this book on the shelves of the next generation of Customer Success innovators.
Maria Martinez
Executive vice president & chief customer experience officer at Cisco