Brought to you by DreamSimplicity and The HotLine Magazine, this video series is for SaaS/Cloud CxO's and the growing Customer Success Management community. Winning in the SaaS/Cloud era is about customer retention and maximizing per-customer profitability through the new profession of CSM.
Being successful in the SaaS/Cloud sector increasingly requires that application vendors become directly involved with the success of their customers. When the bulk of the profit from a customer must be earned incrementally over time, the longevity of the customer relationship is a critical factor in corporate profitability. A new role is appearing in the corporate organization chart: Customer Success Manager.
In the past couple of years, a new role has been proliferating rapidly across the SaaS/Cloud sector's organizational charts. Although fairly commonly known as Customer Success Managers, there is wide variety in the actual functions of these positions. The differences seem to be associated with what might be called a maturation process for CSM teams. They begin as a new name for senior customer support engineers, and, hopefully, start to grow towards being the trusted advisors of the company.
When the features and functionality of Product A are essentially the same as Product B, what will truly distinguish one software vendor from another? What can justify a premium price when software becomes a commodity? It's not about the software anymore, or the insistent race to add ever more features and functionality. The true product is the relationship wherein both parties, customer and vendor, profit from continuing their work together.
The ability of a CSM group to be effective is highly dependent upon the technology that is available to it. The starting point is the ability to track what customers are doing with the app; this is a must-have core element of the technology suite. With it, you can develop detailed profiles of your customer value tiers and identify behaviors you want to encourage. The technology is only the beginning. The data won't use itself. That's where the domain expertise of the CSM comes into play.
The shift to the SaaS/Cloud business model has had profound effects on every aspect of the technology industry, including the very definition of the term "customer." Is it only companies that are customers? What about the people who make up those entities? The reality is that both people and companies are part of your "customerium," the community of people associated in some way with your company. And the only way that you can truly lose them is to throw them away yourself.
Every Customer Support group is essentially a knowledge inventory operation, with knowledge repositories and access channels to those sources. Some access channels are inherently more efficient and effective than others for handling particular kinds of distribution requests. The key is to understand which requests to send to which channels, and why. The key to winning in Customer Success lies in effective usage and marketing of your data resources.
Dominique Levin of Totango talks about customer success and how Cloud Applications now provide analytics that tell the story of how an application is being used, generating great data for shaping a successful product.
Matt catches up with Totango's Co-founder and CEO, Guy Nirpaz in San Francisco to learn more about their real-time customer engagement solutions.
Tayloe Stansbury from Intuit talks about the internal ecosystem and resources needed to improve the customer experience.