Deep Dives

Inaugural Customer Success Leadership Study

Welcome to the Inaugural Customer Success Leadership Study – brought to you by your Customer Success friends at ChurnZero, ESG, and Higher Logic. Now, we know you’re here for the good-looking charts and practical takeaways, so we’ll keep this intro short. After analyzing hundreds of survey responses and consulting our team of Customer Success experts […]

Customer Feedback Strategy in 4 Simple* Steps

Alright, you did it. You asked for feedback from your customers, so you can be done now, right?! WRONG! Asking for feedback and receiving those responses is just the beginning. In fact, it’s step one in the ACAF Customer Feedback Loop model. What, exactly, does ACAF stand for? Here are the deets: Ask for customer […]

Monetizing Customer Success: What You Need to Know Before Taking the Plunge

The need for Customer Success is rapidly rising across diverse industries, company sizes, and business models. No longer relegated to Software as a Service (SaaS), companies are eager to dive headfirst into the many benefits of implementing their own CS program. But as you build or expand your CS capability, one of the first questions […]

Outsourcing Customer Success vs. Building Internally

Whether you are in the early stages of developing a Customer Success team or revamping your existing CS efforts, you may find yourself wondering if outsourcing Customer Success is right for your organization. There are many benefits of leaning on an experienced external partner, but the topic must be approached thoughtfully, keeping both your short […]

Applying MVP to CS: The How

Despite over a decade of proven effectiveness in software development by companies like Groupon, Zappos, Dropbox, and Uber, the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has not yet been widely adopted by Customer Success leaders to build or expand their Customer Success operations. It’s time to change that! Check out our blog post for reasons […]

Swallowing the Fish

The phrase “swallowing the fish,” from TSIA’s Technology-as-a-Service Playbook, gets tossed around frequently in the technology industry. Even though it sounds like an instruction on eating seafood, the term refers to the transition from technology as an asset to technology as a service. What’s the difference? An asset is something you buy and then have […]

The 10 Simple* Traits of an Awesome CSM

Every year, LinkedIn publishes a list of the “most promising” jobs in the American job market. Two years in a row, Customer Success Manager (CSM) has made the top 10, with year-over-year growth of more than 80 percent both years. Many of the jobs on that list didn’t even exist five years ago. Others, like […]

Effectively Managing Subscription Consumption

Subscription-based businesses, especially in software, are taking the world by storm. According to The Software Report, software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses make up an industry with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. In the SaaS world, aggressive growth is not just desirable, but expected. According to forentrepreneurs.com, median revenue growth in the SaaS world is […]

Breaking Down Customer Success Costs

Ready to stand up a Customer Success strategy in your organization? It’s crucial to understand the true cost of Customer Success (hint: it goes way beyond salary). Well-meaning organizations may find themselves with significant investments in human capital only to find their processes aren’t scalable or they’re overspending on hard, soft, and fringe benefit costs. […]

Onboarding your customers with purpose, momentum, and precision

“The seeds of churn are planted early, and those seeds are planted deep if your onboarding experience is bad.” – Lincoln Murphy It’s widely understood that a good onboarding is critical to ongoing customer happiness. But it’s tricky, and we often miss the mark because: Onboarding a new customer is hard to do. We tend […]

Building a Business Case for more Customer Success resources

In the archives of the prestigious research firm Forrester, there’s an article written by a seasoned analyst highlighting what she foresaw as key business trends for the coming year. Number two on her list was “Companies Will Explore Proactive Engagement.” She wrote: “Proactive engagements anticipate the what, when, where, and how for customers, and prioritize […]

Neuroscience and Customer Success: Building a strategy that supports human interaction

In 2015, researchers Dominic Fareri, Luke Chang and Mauricio Delgado published an article in The Journal of Neuroscience on the power of collaborative interactions in building and maintaining relationships. One of their experiments involved playing a simple game. Some participants were told they were playing the game with other people while others were told they […]