Thoughts from my journey

Customer Success Bootcamp

I’ve spent some time yesterday at a customer success bootcamp with one of my favorite customers.

The leaders have decided to spend two full days with the team in order to build alignment within the team with regards to customer success. This is a company that one of it’s core values is: “Customer Centricity”.

As a customer centric company, is the mission statement of customer success should be about customer love – making sure customers love the company, it’s product, people and services, or is it about value delivery?

This is a very important question that many customer success organizations are dealing with. The consensus these days is that customer value is what matters most, but many have thought differently in the past.

Customer success is a business function with clear business goals – impact CLTV, impact retention and customer growth. By focusing on the value to customer that drives the decision to renew and buy more teams impact CLTV. As a side effect, you get the customer love, as they are successful & satisfied.

I explain it in more details at this video below (this part starts at 6:30 min)
https://youtu.be/-Xm8ejkxMUs?t=6m30s (for direct link)

The idea behind the first Customer Success Summit came as a result of many conversation with new customers who’ve asked us to connect with their peer group. As Customer Success is relatively new and there is not a lot of known best practices, customer success practitioners wanted to exchange notes with one another.

The first Customer Success Summit took place on March 2013 at the financial district in San Francisco. We didn’t know exactly what to expect and setup a place for 50-60 people. We ended up with 120 people. The room that we’ve booked was full all day and people had to stand in the aisles.

The 2nd Customer Success Summit which took place at the Tera Gallery in San Francisco last march was already a bigger more polished event that drew 400 professionals.

This year, the Customer Success Summit is going to be 10 times bigger than the first one! I keep feeling that it’s much easier to talk to Customer Success in 2015 than ever before. This year the agenda is also influenced significantly by the attendees. Thru the summit Facebook page, we’ve made sure to communicate daily with the audience who’s planning to attend. To take part of the conversation, simply like the page here and get involved.

I suspect that like the previous years, the summit will be sold out at least two weeks before the event. You should check it out today, and don’t forget to register if you’re interested in learning from your peers about Customer Success. The summit is a very good fit for customer success professionals, but also to any other SaaS/Software executive who’s building or is part of a Customer-Centric organization.

Last year we’ve introduced the Customer Success Manifesto, and this year we’re going to be introducing additional set of frameworks, including financials ones.

I’m looking forward to March – this is my favorite time of the year, much due to the annual Customer Success Summit. See you all there.

Tien Tzuo, CEO and Founder of Zuora the subscription billing company is well known within the SaaS industry. He had coined the term ‘Subscription Economy’ and has been pushing heavily for subscription model adoption by many companies.

When I approached Tien to speak at the Customer Success Summit – he immediately agreed. He promised that he has a very good story to share with the audience. Tien openly admitted to Zuora’s challenges with meeting customer expectations and keeping the promise, which is what Customer Success is about.

In this video presentation, Tien not only shares the challenge but also the proposed customer success solution they have implemented at Zuora. Tien is also doing this in a very engaging way, I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Just listen, let me know what you think?

In the 2nd annual customer success summit last month in San Francisco, I’ve introduced the Customer Success Manifesto. If you are familiar with the agile software development manifesto will see a similar presentation style (visuals are updated to 2014 though).

The Customer Success Manifesto should be viewed as 6 rules for great customer success. I’ve decided to work on a crisp defintion for the term Customer Success by defining what it is and what it is not for myself first and foremost for Totango’s team and customers and the industry in general.

Customer Success Summit: Customer Success Manifesto from Totango on Vimeo.

BTW, the reason it took me a minute or two during the key note to get to my ‘high note’ was a very long preparation cycle that ended at 3am the night (morning?) before the event.

Happy to get your feedback and thoughts…