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Now that you’ve done that (thank you), let’s dive in…
According to Bain’s Customer Success Practitioner Survey 2024, 60% of B2B SaaS companies have a customer success team within their organizations.
And yet, net revenue retention is dropping like a led balloon.
According to the survey, two thirds of customers believe their needs are only moderately being met, or worse.
And to make matters worse, there’s a disconnect between what vendors think customers want and what they say they need. Just look at the graphic below. Customers’ TOP priority is technical assistance implementing the product. When asked, companies prioritize the same need LAST.
Bain CS study results
How can this be? How can companies be so disconnected from the voice of their customers?
Here are the fundamentals you need for customer success:
1/ Specialized implementation and onboarding
Dedicate people to every customer or build onboarding into the product.
2/ Fantastic support
This is the "dial tone" of customer success. Always on, always reliable, always fast and helpful for customers. Yes, we need to engage with customers proactively but don't underestimate the power of a quick, high-quality response when a customer has an acute need.
3/ Intuitive products
The Bain article address it, but software products—especially enterprise software—needs to be better. Better fit to purpose. Better usability. Easier to implement and configure. And not only the physical product, the documentation, self-serve resources, support, and services around it. The whole product.
Product development must pursue customer success goals, not just blindly ship feature after feature.
4/ Account management
Implement proactive account management staffed by people who bend toward value-led selling and retention. Develop a methodology and enable these teams on customer value creation plans, and assign them commercial responsibility for maintaining and growing a book of accounts. Nothing’s more powerful.
The best account management teams have always done these things. In 2024 these expectations aren’t too high.
I’ve seen so many companies build huge customer success teams to fill the gaps in the product and give a high-touch experience to top customers. It doesn’t work because human knowledge doesn’t scale unless it’s written down, or better yet, built into the product.
If you’ve followed me for any time, you know I’m an advocate of customer success—the OUTCOME. But many customer success teams need a major makeover.
Generic, high-level, jack-of-alll-trades CSMs just won’t cut it anymore, and it's a drag on your P&L. The data in the Bain report tells the story.
How are you addressing this in your company? Join the original discussion here.
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We’re grateful you choose to read each week.
When you’re ready for more, there are a couple ways we can help:
» Cover Your SaaS is a financial literacy course for go-to-market leaders. Grab your copy here.
» Promote your product and services to over 4,000+ senior SaaS Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success pros by sponsoring our twice-weekly newsletter and podcast.
