Is this the end of Customer Success?
This week I came across two contrarian views to the current default that every tech company needs to invest in Customer Success.
Customer Success as a function is pretty recent - really gathering pace since 2015 as SaaS businesses realised that there was no point investing dollars in acquiring customers if you couldn’t keep them and grow them.
You can see the interest increase over time via Google Trends:
The role of the CSM is to act as an advocate for the customer, and focus on reducing the consumption gap as the vendor releases more products.
Here are two alternative views
Frank Slootman - Snowflake CEO and ex ServiceNow CEO
In Frank’s recent book Amp It Up he describes how both ServiceNow and Snowflake had Customer Success teams when he arrived - and he shut them both down, reassigning the team members back to the departments where their expertise fitted best.
“If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services,” he says.
Frank goes on to say that customer success is everyone’s business, and if sales and onboarding and technical support are doing their jobs correctly there isn’t a need for a separate team to hold the hand of the customer.
Jason Lemkin - SaaStr CEO
At SaaStr Europa in London this week Jason hosted an AMA and the question was asked, where do you see Customer Success going in the next 3-5 years.
“We will have to remake the industry, after the experience of the last year, it has turned the CSM from the advocate of the customer to a wing of sales”
As new business has dried up, the revenue target has been moved to the existing customers. They have been threatened during renewals, threatened during upsells.
Jason talks about an anonymous vendor CSM threatening their 7 person business that they needed to upgrade to a 100 user package and pre-pay for four years.
What is the role of the CSM?
A CSM’s primary role is to ensure that the customer gets the value that they expected from the product they bought - so that they renew and upgrade.
But let’s look at it from another angle, what isn’t the role of the CSM?
The CSM is not meant to focus on any commercial aspects of the relationship. No selling, no renewing, no issuing of contracts.
They are also not supposed to focus on any technical support or product issues.
Their role is to be an advocate for the customer - and the moment companies drive them into other areas, then their value as an independent role is removed.
As Jason goes on to say, they should probably just be rebranded back to Account Managers as the CSM term has been tarnished for many customers over the last year.
Is this the end of the CSM role?
If SaaS businesses are to scale, driving adoption and expansion in existing customers is a key factor.
For CSM functions to continue to earn the trust of the customers they support they will need to reassert that they are not a wing of sales, that they have no commercial responsibility and that they are only focused on the customer getting value from the products they have purchased.
This may need companies to look again at their compensation model for CSMs (which is very similar to Account Managers).
CSM’s also need to take a look at the venn diagram above and instead of focusing on what they don’t do, improve the way they communicate what they do do.
Customers will always need someone who proactively focuses on helping them get the most out of the product they have purchased, you’ll just need to determine if that person also issues contracts and gets paid when they do.
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