Author: jatin_qualhon

Implementing Customer Success – An Organizational Balancing Act

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Following from our previous article on the importance of strategic foundations for creating a customer-centric culture to successfully implement customer success (CS), we’re pleased to follow on here about the company organization itself. We’re still aligned with the chronological OPT-IN² framework to which we previously referred, an acronym meaning: Organisation – Processes – Tools – INformation – INtegration.

While we saw in our previous article the strategic pillars of customer-centricity and service alignment, the organization of the company is the supporting backbone which will structure the progressive operationalization of customer success, allowing it to adapt and transform to a customer-centric and CS-championed company.

Without the organizational backbone firmly in place, there is a high risk that the CS strategy and tactical efforts will crumble.

(Success Track Enterprise)

We like to think of the fundamentals of the CS organization like a 3-legged stool, permanently supporting and keeping in balance CS operationalization as it is progressively implemented.

If all 3 organizational legs are not firmly balanced at all times, then the supporting framework topples over, bringing down the operational CS efforts supporting the customer-centric strategy. We consider that the 3 supporting legs are as follows:

Charter

Responsibility

Executive Buy-in

(Success Track Enterprise)

Charter

Why is it important to have a customer success charter? This is an essential part of any customer-centric company as often the 2 correlated words of “customer success” are misunderstood or non-aligned across companies. It is essential to state loud and clear what is meant by customer success, what is its vision and what is the charter for its mission. The customer success charter will evolve as customers, vendors and their solutions and services evolve.

The vision for customer success is the strategy to drive a sustained dual growth engine for both customers and the vendor alike. Indeed, in the current business world where recurring revenue models and subscriptions are being rapidly adopted, the traditional seller-buyer relationship is gradually being replaced. These two parties have now evolved into a different kind of relationship, one of true partnership where they mutually help each other to grow and prosper: clients invest in a solution and/or service which will adapt and expand with their growing needs while the vendors benefit from their clients’ growth and consequent additional investment.

(Lehigh University)

The vision of customer success includes above all what the customers need to achieve, or their “desired outcomes” as refered to by Lincoln Murphy. This corresponds to the mission statement of customer success, meaning how your company – corporate-wide – ensures that your customers’ evolving needs, desired outcomes and experience are met over time. The mission and charter of customer success evolve as vendor strategies develop and mature, adapting to the needs of their customer base. Customer success mission statements usually include an evolution of the following objectives as vendors and their customer base mature together: adoption -> performance and value outcomes -> transformation – ROI – advocacy. There are multiple internal corporate activities around these evolving objectives, resulting in the customers wishing to renew and expand their current investment

(Success Track Enterprise)

“The vision and mission of customer success is a win-win viral spiral of health and wealth!”

To reach this vision, customer success must be viewed as a corporate-wide responsibility and which brings us to balancing our 3-legged stool with the second leg.

Responsibility

In the previous traditional seller-buyer relationship, our business mindset was conditioned by the seller owning knowledge and power and practicing short-term financial wins (usually only for their company) based on short-term quota-driven selling incentives. In our current business environment, our mindset needs to adapt to the fact that the previous model has flipped: customers now own the power and knowledge and financial gains are only achieved over the long term (for both vendor and customer alike). As a consequence of this shift, revenue generation is no longer the fruit of just pre-contractual marketing and sales activities. As sustainable revenue generation is now a long-term challenge, all cross-functional departments are responsible, working together in sync across the entire customer journey. In essence, customer success is a corporate-wide strategy which embraces all internal roles (marketing, sales, account management, R&D, product, support, professional services, finance,…) whether they are client facing or not. Even roles in the wings of the client stage are indirectly contributing to making customers successful, often serving internal clients who in turn, will directly serve external clients.

(SteamKR)

So while all internal departments should be aware and made responsible for tactically contributing to the success of their clients, there is also the emerging function of customer success and which usually (although not exclusively) is positioned as a post-contractual team which partners the success of clients. As an example, marketing and sales team would work together in a seamless process by validating prospect needs, evaluating expectations and desired outcomes which would be communicated to the CS teams for a partnership delivery with clients.

This customer success function is a critical role, working closely with all the other internal departments to continually communicate the voice of the customer so that the aforementioned main CS mission statements can be continually reviewed and aligned: adoption – performance – transformation – ROI – advocacy. The function of customer success proactively partners clients in a consultant and advisory role to help clients achieve their expected outcomes. This implies strong client domain knowledge as well as a clear understanding and insights in their evolving business, operational, functional and technical context.

Very often, the post-contractual function of customer success is parachuted as an add-on to existing established roles without reviewing the holistic impact of the CS corporate-wide mission. In other cases, confusion is created internally and externally when already existing roles such as support, account management, project management or professional services are renamed to the name of “customer success”, without reviewing their existing role and mission. For Customer Success to be efficient, the roles and responsibilities of all internal actors need to be reviewed, continually communicated and teams trained and incentivized on the changing scope of their own contribution to the success of their clients.

CS is not the sole responsibility of a post-contractual department but is the shared responsibility of all internal functions. In the same way, no single function “owns the client”. The client is in fact owned by the corporate collective and seamless process of engaging

and delivering to meet expectations and outcomes. Each function contributes to the collective vision, while the customer success function acts as a critical pivot, acting as the voice of the customer to fine-tune and adjust the collective group music, rather like a conductor of an orchestra.

Having a privileged long-term partner relationship with customers, the CS function ensures that internal organization, processes and all contributors are aligned to continually deliver on expectations and play together in tune. This results in securing long-term health and wealth for their clients and their own companies. To ensure this harmonious sound of music, top-down buy-in is vital and which brings us to the third leg of the 3-legged stool.

Executive Buy-In

For a CS organization to be successful, it must be a strategic part of the corporate vision, infused top-down from executive management. This implies top executive buy-in cascading buy-in across the whole company, resulting in CS becoming the ADN of the new corporate organization.

To achieve this company-wide CS ADN, this implies a progressive transformational approach where change management and sponsorship is key to success. For a company’s organization to steer towards the CS vision, a new mindset, processes, behaviours and routines need to be adopted so that all cross-functional departments are aligned in their collective contribution to success. In turn, these cross-functional contributors need to be driven by appropriate and equitable goals, KPIs, incentives and compensation. As CS organizations mature, they will gradually reinforce their footprint, building up the business case for their “raison d’être” as a strategic revenue-generating profit centre.

The question is often raised as to where the CS function should ideally be positioned within the company organization. While this depends on the size and organizational evolution of companies, what is most important is that the CS organization is driven as an instinctive top-down mindset, irrespective of the company hierarchical structure. Indeed and as developed in our previous article, CS is more a question of a holistic corporate culture rather than of organizational hierarchy.

The challenge of any CS-centric company is to permanently keep the 3 legs of the supporting stool (Charter – Responsibility – Executive Buy-In) in perfect balance and aligned as the company grows and adapts to clients’ evolving needs.

If any one leg starts to change in size, disproportionately to the others, there is always the risk of it toppling over and no longer supporting the associated processes, people, tools and data. We’ll be glad to share our thoughts on these in our follow-on articles and continuing our reference to the OPT-IN framework and best practices in operationalizing a proactive CS organization.

Thanks

Sue Nabeth Moore and Daniel Coullet

As we observe momentum building up in Europe around the emerging role of customer success, I’d like to share a few thoughts around this business metamorphosis we are witnessing. While this new role is still very much at experimentation stage as it positions itself in the recurring revenue business model, there are common themes around its practice and impact. This inspired me to create a series of some reflections around recurring themes and which I have called “Customer Success of Things” (CSoT)

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Creating a Customer-Centric Culture To Successfully Lead and Implement Customer Success

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The success of your customer depends on the continued added value you create and the experience you deliver to them. Successful organizations are shifting from being product-centric to a customer-centric mindset and often adopting and delivering via a recurring revenue or subscription based business model. These models imply a long-term correlation between the added value gained and financial engagement of the customer. Indeed, the more value gained, the more likely the client is going to wish to continue and even increase the amount of their subscription investment. As quoted by Jason Lemkin:

“Customer success is where 90% of the revenue is”

After e-meeting each other on social media and appreciating our common passion for the customer centricity of things, we (Daniel Coullet and Sue Nabeth Moore) propose to share some thoughts around a customer success (CS) framework developed across the layers illustrated in the diagram below: C.S. – O.P.T.IN²:

OPT-IN²~Framework – Success Track Enterprise

The “C” and “S” are the strategic layers, meaning Customer centricity and Service alignment. “CS” is also a common acronym for Customer Success.

O.P.T.IN² refers to the CS objective of ensuring customers wish to stay for good. It is also an acronym which spells the operational chronological steps across which the defined CS strategy is operationalised:

O = Organization, P = Process, T = Tools. For the “IN²”, in parallel to the former steps, there is an evolutive and agile initiative around INformation (data) as well as the on-going Integration of the Organization, Processes, Tools and Information.

The above will be outlined across 3 articles, the first of which on the strategic foundations is below. The second will be on the operationalisation of CS and the third a concrete case study.

Many software companies in SaaS or subscription models today are doing their best to try and create customer success management organizations and are often reactively addressing the threat of churn. So let’s move forward by building a framework that will help us iterate to become a best-in-class company that proactively delivers continued great value and experience to customers.

What does it take to operationalize customer success so that you not only mitigate the threat (churn) but you also create the opportunity to fully align your organization to proactively partner your customer’s expected outcomes? In turn, this will then grow your business by increasing renewal and expansion, consequently reducing churn and fostering client advocates.

Strategic Foundations

We outline below what we consider to be two strategic pillars and some related best practices which create the foundations for a customer success organization to become successful : customer centricity and service alignment:

Customer Centricity

In the age of the customer, the vendor-customer power has flipped.

Before suppliers had the power to sell without being that concerned about the business outcomes of their customers’ investment. In the software world, this was particularly the case with the on-premise model. Now, with abundant knowledge and alternative solutions to solve pain points and the growth of subscription, customers have the power to opt out more easily from their engagement – operationally, functionally, technically and financially. This means that company mindsets should move from being traditionally product focused to include customers as the key business driving force. As George Colony, Forrester CEO predicts, if a company is not customer-centric, they’ll simply be out of business between 5 – 10 years.

So, what are some of the key competencies and pre-requisites to become customer-centric? Indeed, there are divergent perceptions on the definition of customer-centricity but in the most simplistic terms, for us it means when the customers are partnered to achieve their expected business outcomes thanks to their investment in your solution and services:

A. Ensure a customer-centric vision top-down:

Top management show buy-in, sponsorship and change management to empower a customer-centric strategic vision.

Define the meaning of customer-centricity.

Top management nurtures and promotes a customer-centric mindset across all the company organisation and cross-functional roles.

Customer-centricity is also embedded as a mindset among internal “customers”. Cross functional roles partner as “internal customers” in the interest of their external customers. Each role knows the expected inputs and outputs of their respective contribution to internal and external customers.

Customer-centricity is the company driving force which determines all behaviours, actions, reflexes and engagement with customers.

*Picture by curtesy of Kilpatrick Group*

Continuous adaptability is encouraged towards changing customer needs.

Objectives and incentives around customer-centricity are aligned across the organisation and roles.

B. Know your customers:

Understand your customer’s current needs and anticipate new ones.

Understand different customer needs according to user profile (or persona) and their impacted stakeholders.

Understand and empathise with customer domain challenges, contexts and pain points. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Anticipate and follow customer domain and market evolutions.

Define and operationalise required client knowledge data (to be developed in our second article).

C. Foster customer experience (CX) principles:

Define via internal collaboration a customer journey/ies and milestones from the customer point of view.

Generate a frictionless customer experience (CX) across the customer journey via an adapted customer relationship.

Align CX and CS principles to create the conditions for success. CX and CS are often treated as 2 distinct disciplines when in fact they complement and feed into each other.

Align the above customer journey/ies with all your company organization, roles and responsibilities.

D. Define expected customer outcomes:

Help customers express their vision of success and how your solution contributes.

Help define and measure tangible business outcomes (per impacted profiles).

Ensure your solution, related services and engagement address the above (use cases).

Communicate, partner and measure how your solution + services contribute to business outcomes.

E. Foster customer success principles:

Define a clear mission statement (charter) for CS.

Ensure all internal actors understand the role of CS as a strategic business pillar.

Ensure each internal actor is empowered in their responsibility and contribution to CS.

Align cross-functional incentives and compensation for CS.

Determine appropriate and pertinent metrics/KPIs to measure CS in alignment with the strategy, e.g. adoption and performance metrics for customers and internal metrics for your company such as NPS, net retention rate, CLTV, churn rate, CSAT, time-to-value, etc…

2. Service Alignment

Ensure that the related services are aligned with the customer-centric strategy. While the use of the word “product” is still common place, e.g. “product to market fit”, “product development”, “product owner”, , “product run” etc…, we prefer to use the word “services” which holistically includes the product and the CX. In the business models of “X as a Service” for example, we consider that maintaining the previous wording and mindset of selling a physical “product” is rather a contradiction in terms. We prefer the term “service” and which englobes the product, the related services and adapted CX. The term “service” also infers that there are expected outcomes which will materialize as the services are consumed, as opposed to the word “product” implying just a means to an end.

A. Design the “Service”:

Unite cross-functional teams to define the expected outcomes and experience at each stage of the customer journey per profile/persona.

Design the product (UX), experience (CX) and services in parallel using a methodology such as Design Thinking to create harmonized value to the customers. In many cases, the experience and services are designed after the product which often creates a non-coherent CX and misalignment and friction between vendors and customers, putting customer success teams in a challenging position.

Consider the CX like a “product” launch, using best practices and processes for software development such as design, quality assurance, and “service” owners,…

B. Design Service Engagement Models:

Define engagement models per client segment needs with the appropriate number of touch points. Synchronize them between the digital, physical and product experience.

Align the engagement models and touch points with your CX and CS principles.

Align the engagement models with your internal key processes and related actors.

Include the ability to measure adoption and performance directly in your product/services in alignment with the metrics defined in your strategy.

Validate with customers their key moments of truth (MoT) during the customer journey which are crucial moments for CX.

Instrument your customer feedback to continually understand if the design (outcomes and experience) are delivering what is expected.

Adjust the above whenever necessary.

The above strategic foundations provide the base upon which the customer success organization can then be operationalised. While customer success is emerging in business as a strategic pillar of recurring revenue models such as SaaS, it is in fact applicable to any customer-centric company intent on generating win-win growth and profitability, irrespective of their business model.

Indeed customer-centricity demands a proactive shift in culture and not just a reactive response to changes in business models. The product, the service and CX are all an intrinsic part of the success of the customer and together they will progressively become an inherent part of the storyboard for doing “business as usual”.

In our next article, we’ll be pleased to share some further thoughts around the above OPT-IN² framework which outlines more best practices in operationalizing proactive customer success with an agile mindset. This will be followed by a case study article.

Picture Source – Vecteezy

Status is online

Sue Nabeth Moore

Co-Founder Success Chain / Top 100 Customer Success Strategist 2021

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Business Mutualism: Customer eXperience and Customer Success Enrich Each Other for Business Health

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A series of articles by Sue Nabeth Moore and Helene Duneigre, October, 2017

Sue is a leader in Customer Success (CS) and is evangelizing it in France, Portugal and the rest of Europe.

Helene is militantly in favour of Customer Experience (CX) which she has promoted and organised for years.

Sue and Helene met in Paris and listened with curiosity to each other’s convictions and practices and found them to be very close, yet different and decided to write about it.

Here’s part 1 and introduction to our series of perspectives on the proximity, comparison and emergence of a business mutualism between

CX and CS:

Helene about CX Stories:

A few months ago, AmazonGo video became viral. They opened a store where thanks to an app in their smartphone, customers come, shop and leave without going through cash desks. There are not even any cash desks in the store by the way!

On April 10th 2017, a disturbing video, about United Airlines this time, got watched thousands of times across the world. It showed a traumatized 69-year-old customer who paid for his ticket and asked for nothing but to be be flown to his destination. He was dragged off the plane and injured as airport police got called by the aircraft staff and dealt with him like a criminal, only to make room for transferring partner airline staff.

On the one hand, we witness what may be the ultimate shopping experience: customer extreme convenience and user friendliness, enabled by sophisticated technology behind the scene.

On the other hand, we witness extreme – and difficult to believe – excess of strict adherence to process and total lack of human empathy by company staff. This, followed by a very poor speech from the CEO later in the day, demonstrating that when a fish rots, it rots from the head down.

These are both examples of customer experience. The best and the worst. Customer Experience is indeed all about how your customers individually perceive interactions with your brand, self-assess their satisfaction compared to their initial expectations, share their story with friends and network and eventually remember afterwards their related emotions.

Sue about CS stories in the making of…:

Being relatively new, the storyboard for CS in Europe is “in the making of” as companies investing in CS are keen to build their ROI business cases.

Whilst CS is currently often associated with SaaS, the first customer success teams saw the light of day with CRM software companies, somewhat frustrated with the poor adoption and relatively low obtained value. The first CS organisation was a non-SaaS company called Vantive in 1996, followed by Siebel on Demand in 2004 and then in 2005, Saleforce gave birth to their “Customers for Life”. If Salesforce is the best-known success-story for CS (80% of their current revenue being driven from their current client base), this emerging role is applicable to any recurring revenue model (SaaS or not) as well as any business wishing to distinguish themselves by making their customers want to stay longer, invest more and advocate on your behalf.

Sue to Helene: What is the definition of Customer Experience?

It is the sum result of how the customer perceives each of its interactions with the company during the whole journey of purchasing and then using its product or services over the duration of their relationship. This perception covers rational assessment as well as emotions. It is highly subjective and individualized.

Helene to Sue: What is the definition of Customer Success ?

Customer success is a company-wide mindset and approach to operationalize and generate win-win growth, for customers and consequently for suppliers. CS is preoccupied with achieving the evolving desired business outcomes of customers as their internal and external contexts change, presenting new challenges and opportunities via their interactions across the customer journey. In the words of Lincoln Murphy:

“Customer success is when customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company”

CS therefore includes CX and aims to obtain customer desired outcomes via controlled operationalisation. In a recent Webinar with Dan Steinman, we explored the following equation relating CS, CX and CO (Customer Outcomes):

CS = CO + CX

Sue to Helene: Who should work on Customer Experience?

Well, when you think about business, you’ll agree that there are no parameters more important than customers. All companies thinking seriously about their long-term performance should be working on their CX.

Traditional companies may have forgotten the customer priority as they are too busy with internal and administrative challenges, regulations, strategy, financial reporting, stock exchange volatility and so many other topics. New entrants, be it already mature digital companies or fresh new start-ups, are focussed on customers as priority. This is one key reason why they are dangerous to established business.

CX references often come today from Amazon, Apple, Uber, Airbnb.

If you look around, you can find your inspiration with lots of others. Nespresso, Maïf, Leroy-Merlin, Midas, Ventes-Privées… are set leaders. Others are improving quickly and smartly: Air France and its digital services, SNCF Voyages, La Poste…

Helene to Sue: Who should be interested in implementing customer success and when?

All recurring revenue companies should be preoccupied with introducing a CS approach. Value is obtained by customers over time through a 3-step succession of adoption , performance and transformation. When customers measure positive ROI during the transformation stage, they will wish to remain loyal and invest more in order to grow more.

CS is not only applicable to software companies and is increasingly more practiced in other typical subscription sectors such as media, telecom and insurance but also in more industrial sectors where IoT and AI enable to measure customer consumption patterns and behaviours.

CS should be anticipated and implemented as soon as companies start acquiring paying customers. The acquisition and contract signature is just the beginning of the customer hands-on experience. The on-boarding stage is critical in ensuring the desire for the customer to adopt new ways of doing business and the consequent customer journey milestones and engagement are key to pave the way to success. If these success milestones are not deliberately traced and the customer journey is perceived as a haphazard mystery tour, then there is a big chance that the customer will lose track and go astray to other places.

Sue to Helene: Why would a company spend time and money in CX?

There are several reasons:

1. Ensuring that customer experience is aligned with the brand promise and their expectation is the healthiest way to build loyalty. This also means it is cheaper and more profitable to recruit new customers.

1. Sustained differentiated experience leads to growth and improved market share.

1. Many surveys and research demonstrate that companies serious about CX are financially performing 5 to 20% better in their sector.

1. CX strategy contributes to giving sense to employees.

1. CX culture can even lead to new and more profitable business models, for example the subscription service model developed by Michelin for truck kilometre service, or else the management print service model adopted by the printing industry.

Helene to Sue: Which benefits can a company expect from working on CS?

The reasons you indicate for CX above are also applicable to CS and in addition:

1. CS enables customers to grow as a result of facilitating the achievement of their desired outcomes.

1. As a consequence of the above, CS allows suppliers to grow.

1. CS allows to operationalise a customer-centric strategy based on driving results. This includes defining customer journeys based on segments, scaling customer engagement and aligning internal roles to meet desired customer outcomes.

1. CS acts as a company financial catalyst. It allows the collection, analysis and actioning of pertinent customer data to control costs, forecast revenue and detect risks and opportunities.

Conclusion

In our current evolving business environment, CS and CX cohabit side by side mutually benefiting each other in a kind of business mutualism:

Mutualism Example Samlung Fotos

the challenges of B2B are inspired by best-in-class B2C CX practices, while the B2C world is evolving their CX approaches into brilliant models and practices where the likes of Netflix and Fitbit have become CS/CX rock stars.

CS and CX share the common ground of customer loyalty and delivering pristine experiences and pertinent engagement across customer journeys. Whilst CX is concerned with delivering an end-to-end positive emotional and rational experience to reach satisfaction and lock loyalty and love, CS extends that to include driving business outcomes and ROI – in a word – success!

Together both CX and CS create a win-win business situation:

“CX locks consumer/customer engagement and CS locks business outcomes”.

Coming soon… join us in our next perspectives on CS and CX.

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Digital Darwinism and Customer Success

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As we onboard 2021 and bid farewell to 2020, the challenges thrust upon us over this past year have demonstrated our immense resilience and capacity to adapt quickly in the face of adversity. Digital transformation is a prime area where we have shown our huge capacity to adapt.

According to a study by McKinsey & Company, digital offerings in 2020 accelerated by 7 years within the space of a few months as companies have surprised themselves with their capacity to pivot their digital initiatives in response to Covid-19. The pandemic has forced companies of all sizes, B2B and B2C to leapfrog their transformation efforts. We are now raising questions about how to anticipate the new digital “normal”, what that will look like, how to maintain momentum and how to set companies up for continued success.

As we celebrate all those companies and staff that have been able to adapt their digital offerings to help their customers get through these unprecedented times and to address new market needs, let’s also keep in our thoughts all those domains, companies and staff that have unfortunately been directly negatively impacted by the pandemic, e.g. travel, hospitality, dining and culture to name but a few.

Let’s view this accelerated digital transformation context from a Darwinian point of view. This is a revised article that I wrote 4 years ago but which resonates more than ever now in the context of the abrupt changes of our current world. The following famous Darwin quote echoes loudly today in our response to the business disruption triggered by Covid-19 and our attempts to survive and resume some sort of balanced “business as usual”:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change (Darwin)

Those of you who have crossed my path will have no doubt been introduced to my mascot chameleon which I affectionately call “Adaptus Rex”. He’s tame and as a prehistoric descendant, he learned to survive environmental change. His capacity to modify his skin colours to adapt to different environments has inspired me in all of life’s challenges, continually adapting to the next phase of evolution.

Whilst history has mostly shown us the somewhat progressive driving force of technology in transformation, digitalization is creating an immediate impact and disruption, particularly so in response to the pandemic. With each new digital offering, there’s a promise of progress that is accompanied by considerable learning curves and adaptation. In some cases, the height of the step to adapt is higher than others, implying considerable change management efforts and learning to take on board new working practices. In other cases, the height of the step to adapt may seemingly be less but as we’re on continual moving sands, it’s difficult to use a yardstick to measure the required effort. Whatever the required effort, we either adapt quickly and survive (thrive for some) or run the risk of being left behind or even extinct! In the words of Brian Solis:

Each business is a victim of digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behaviour when society and technology move faster than the ability to exploit it. Digital Darwinism does not discriminate. Every business is threatened.

Digital Darwinism has been accelerated with the disruptive impact of Covid-19 as we have been collectively catapulted outside of our comfort zones and plunged right into unknown territory. All of us, suppliers and customers alike have had no choice but to learn fast.

These challenging times have also reinforced companies putting the customer right at the strategic centre, focusing on doing everything possible to help and retain the current customer base. This customer-centric strategy has highlighted the strategic importance of customer success and how it runs through the veins of all the company, where each and every role contributes to helping customers survive, perhaps even thrive. Many companies have reinforced their customer success efforts, put into place special success task forces or crisis committees, bringing sales, support, product and other roles into redefining roles and responsibilities in the “collective customer success team” effort. This company-wide team effort is now playing a vital role by helping customers pivot, step out of their comfort zones to adapt quickly to new and unknown situations where their ever-changing pain points are resolved.

feet in canvas shoes standing inside comfort zone – foot selfie from personal perspective – chalk text on asphalt

Customer success partners customers to help them blend their invested tools and services into their working environment. This means that customer success professionals need to be experts not only with the tools and services offered by their company but also to know how these tools and services can become “camouflaged” in the customers’ new working habitats.

It’s rather like Adaptus Rex’s capacity to adapt his skin colour according to different habitats. With our Covid-19 impacted habitat, our adaptation capacity has been tested to the extreme. It has not been like our previous gradual adaptation to digital offerings in continuous improvement mode. This time, our adaptation capacity has been triggered out of pure survival. Customer success has played such a critical role in helping customers to adapt in record time to new environments and facilitate our collective metamorphosis. The real challenge of this rapid metamorphosis process is not about the technology itself. It’s rather about how the technology, digitalization and its promise fit into the fast-evolving organizations, processes, routines and behaviours. This is where customer success professionals have demonstrated their capacity to anticipate new customer pain points, learn and adapt to these ever-changing environments, transferring their knowledge to help customers develop new skills to meet their evolving goals and survive.

To give some Darwinian evolutionary examples in nature, a famous story took place in my native northern England during the last major technological evolution: the industrial revolution. To ensure camouflage as a consequence of the sooty northern manufacturing towns, peppered moths, originally white, became predominantly black via a reproduction process.

Another recent example in response to current climatic change is the shift of snail shell colour from dark to light. Snails have developed lighter coloured shells which have a lower body temperature to keep cooler in response to global warming. This phenomenon is noticeable in France where I live where snails are still a culinary delicacy, whatever their shell colour !

Whilst we humans have not suddenly developed coloured shells and wings (although I believe I can fly) to adapt to this harsh environment thrust upon us, we are being forced to challenge more than ever before our “business as usual”: business models, organization, processes, tools, behaviours and routines. Most companies have now adapted to operating with remote workforces, attending online meetings and events and investing in tools for remote collaboration, onboarding, team building and customer engagement. This last year has forced us into adopting new working habits that we would have not thought possible when we were celebrating the arrival of 2020 just one year ago!

Prior to Covid-19, we were adapting digital offerings in a rather progressive manner where “digital transformation” was being placed as a priority for business strategies. In reality, however, companies were often struggling to adopt digital offerings and make digitalization an inherent part of the company DNA. Unlike the instinct-driven metamorphosis of our friends Adaptus Rex, the peppered moth and the shell-changing snail, our response to change has always been complex. It is perhaps because we human beings are the most intelligent of creatures on earth (we are led to believe) that we have often approached each new business evolution, including digital transformation with too much thought, emotion, memory and resistance. It is also because we are not always conscious of the risks ahead or are simply not measuring the risk of staying in our comfort zone.

With our Covid-19 impacted environment, our adaptation process has been more in line with the instinct-triggered adaptation of our friends from the animal kingdom. Like the peppered moths of my native England, we humans face the challenge of adapting quickly to our accelerated digital environment in order for our business to simply survive. We need to rapidly “camouflage” the new technology and associated behaviour, blending it into our daily habitat so that it becomes the accepted “norm”, at least until the next evolution! With remote working practices and collaboration for example, we’re still learning about the tools but also acclimatizing associated best practices, code of conduct, new routines and associated soft skills.

Customer success is a role to partner our fellow human beings to acclimatize as quickly as possible to our new surroundings and rise to the new challenges of a world propelled more than ever by technological and digital innovation to overcome a global crisis: whether that be to facilitate remote collaboration, to foster online payment, to facilitate eCommerce transactions, to produce vaccines and monitor their supply chain, distribution and impact, to use 3D printing to produce medical supplies, to use AI to monitor and anticipate important data including the spread and behaviour of Covid-19 around the world … and the list goes on.

As we embrace 2021, I’d like to congratulate all the companies, all their customer success efforts (customer success teams and all roles of the company) that have adapted and delivered their offerings (digital and non-digital) to help their customers and their own companies to survive and even thrive over the past year. I’d also like to send thoughts to those companies, customers and staff in verticals that have been directly negatively impacted by the pandemic.

“Adaptus Rex” joins me to wish you all the best for 2021 with joy, health and continued business adaptation, evolution and success!

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