Customer success trends and predictions

Today, customer success owns the postsales relationship with the customer. This is often coordinated through a variety of roles (customer success managers, architects, and specialists) to address all needs of the customer across the full customer journey. This requires blurring functional lines to create a synchronized effort that breaks down silos and streamlines coordination across customer success and sales.

We predict that in the coming year, the role of customer success will grow to become truly dynamic, with the ability for customer success resources to flex into multiple domains of customer experience as needed, regardless of whether the customer is in the early stages of the sales cycle or years into using the product. This dynamic relationship will require a more flexible staffing model that includes a group of customer success overlay resources who are not dedicated to assigned accounts, but instead are available to be targeted where there is the greatest customer need at any given time. The dynamic model allows customer success to become adaptable in scaling to serve more customers, and it also creates an opportunity for these overlay resources to become highly skilled specialists in responding at high-impact moments across the customer journey, such as onboarding, renewal, or incident resolution.

As customer success becomes a part of an integrated services portfolio, along with professional services, support, and learning, we believe that companies will increasingly adopt a product management mindset toward their customer success offerings. This allows companies to shift focus to driving outcomes, as opposed to selling individual services. We have already started witnessing this customer success trend within some companies and expect this to become widespread going forward. Setting up product management capabilities with customer success teams; building multiple offerings tailored for specific customer segments; and packaging multiple components of CS, professional services, support, and learning together will become more widespread.

To realize this, we believe that companies will need to build structured engagement mechanisms across the multiple teams involved and establish strong feedback loops. We also see companies continue to invest in the capability to deliver customer success motions digitally inside the product. Additionally, the integration of customer success into a packaged product has also enabled customer success teams to scale with cost-efficiency and increase the ability of companies to drive business outcomes for a broader set of customers. Therefore, we predict this trend to continue.

Partners have always played an important role as the face of a company to many of its customers. Among those companies that today leverage the partner channel as part of their go-to-market strategy, we’re already seeing some partners heavily involved with the sales cycle, including prioritizing and qualifying opportunities. It requires a heavy investment of time and resources to set up and manage partners; however, the upside is generally well worth it, as partners can both drive new revenue and share valuable customer information to inform the product road map and customer engagement strategy.

We predict that programs around partner-delivered customer success will grow in 2021, allowing companies to scale this capability while managing their own infrastructure and resources costs. Another customer success trend we observe is that as partners increasingly take ownership of the outcomes that customers want to realize, they will require greater access to customer data to deliver those outcomes and grow customer lifetime value. We see partner-led customer success as a significant area of opportunity that can allow companies to tap into the power of their ecosystems to drive retention and growth while creating additional monetization opportunities for their partners. This will become a material revenue source for both companies (through greater expansion opportunities) and their partners as they become more involved in the sales cycle.

Today, we see companies moving beyond lagging measures of customer sentiment (like net promoter score or CSAT) to design their own bespoke customer health scores, leveraging product telemetry to track adoption and performance. However, there is room for significant further progress to be made.

One of the areas in which we are seeing increasing maturity is adopting a unified customer health score across all product categories to enable a holistic approach to customer engagement. We are seeing a continued focus on identifying the right set of metrics to drive the customer health score and articulate value realization, specifically business value realization. However, identifying the right metrics, which are unique for every company, currently presents the most substantial challenge for companies.

The second, we also see customers playing a larger role in informing their own health score. Customers can exercise this influence through joint development of success plans, informing its key milestones and identifying business value metrics in a collaborative manner with their CS teams. Further, the digital maturity in customer success operations will allow customers to have access to an on-demand dashboard that will give them visibility into their success plans and account health at any given time, thereby driving greater engagement and collaboration.

We predict that the bulk of customer success motions will be delivered digitally moving forward, across all coverage models: high-touch, low-touch, or self-serve. As customers expect more insights, self-service, and integrated experiences, a digital-first approach will be at the forefront of delivering customer experience.

We see automation of workflows and customer touchpoints as a key enabler to drive scale in customer success coverage. Even in high-touch models, we expect customer success teams to leverage digital tools to drive personalized communications and more frequent touchpoints, point customers to the appropriate content, and leverage conferencing tools to bring the appropriate subject-matter advisers at the right time. Interactive dashboards will enable CSMs to share customers’ success plans and health scores in real time with them. For low-touch motions, a menu of resources, made available online and complemented by automated communications triggered by specific events, will allow companies to take customer success practices deep into small and midmarket layers.