customer experience – Success Chain

When customer success (CS) first came into the mainstream, many vendors focused firmly on their product. They were very focused on specific features and functions. They spent a lot of time and effort explaining the product and its roadmap to customers.

From technology focus to a customer outcomes focus

Slowly, we are seeing a shift where CS teams are focusing on understanding the customers’ business objectives and desired outcomes. The current thinking is that by focusing on business outcomes, you can better demonstrate the value that the customer is achieving from the vendor’s product. This value discussion then will lead to increased upsells and renewals. This is an important and impactful shift. But it alone is not enough.

The critical area that has long been overlooked by CS teams (and their customers) is identifying and proactively addressing the required people-behavior shift that is needed to achieve success. Once desired business outcomes have been defined, CS teams and their customers need to put people at the center of their focus and efforts. They need to concentrate on helping users – people – change their behavior so that they are adopting technology in a way that will deliver the required business outcomes.

The people – behavior challenge

The biggest challenge on the critical path to customer success is not the technology itself. It is getting people to change the way they do their job on a daily basis, to embrace the system, and use it as designed and intended. It is figuring out how to make sure that current staff quickly shift their work behaviors and adopt the new system. And then it is about making sure that new hires rapidly adopt the new desired work behaviors so that they use the system in a way that creates value. And finally, the challenge becomes how to evolve and sustain effective user behaviors as both the technology product and the customers’ organizations develop. Without this ongoing focus on ensuring users deliver desired behaviors, the customers’ success will steadily fall over time.

Implications for Customer Success

What this means for customer success teams is that they need to ensure they have the expertise, experience, tools, and methodologies to help their customers address user behavior change and ensure software adoption over the long-term. All of the KPIs, automation, onboarding conversations, and QBRs will deliver little results over the long-term if your CS team cannot help customers solve their underlying business challenge – that is, driving effective user adoption that will yield the required business results.

CS leaders looking to develop people-centric customer success should do the following:

1. Map out the critical path that a customer must take from the time of first contact (pre-sales) up to the point of achieving their desired business outcomes. What specific behavior changes are required across the user populations to deliver this result? What do your CS services due to address these critical needs?

2. Ask yourself this question: If the system was already live, people had already been trained on the technology, and we still are not effective adoption, what else could we do to change users’ behavior? If you exclude changes to technology and additional system training and focus on peoples’ behavior, could you still drive success?

3. Increase the capacity to drive behavior change. Most CS leaders will find that their organization lacks the expertise, tools, and methods to identify the various factors that affect behavior and then proactively address these to drive desired behaviors across the user groups. If you lack these skills and processes in your CS team, how will you be able to help customers address this core need?

4. Once you have the right expertise on your team, look outside of what is typically done on IT projects to figure out where different actions, tools, and methods are needed to help users change their behavior and adopt the technology. Identify where you need to change how you engage with customers to get them to take the steps that will deliver desired behavior, and in turn, business outcomes.

5. Figure out how to scale your efforts. You will quickly realize that many of your customers probably lack the expertise, experience, and ability to drive software adoption within their organization. The biggest force-multiplier you will find is that by increasing your customers’ ability to drive adoption within their organization, they will remove a large amount of burden from your CS team. You will probably need to educate your customers on effective software adoption practices and methods. And you will need to figure out how to provide this type of education to your customers in a fast, scalable way.

The Success Chain team has worked with a large number of CS teams and the buyers of software to help them increase their ability to drive and sustain effective software adoption proactively. Our proven educational programs help buyers of software develop the skills they need to increase the effective use of software within their organizations. We also have corresponding programs for vendors that teach CS teams how to help lead their customers in developing successful software adoption programs. Please contact us if you would like to learn more and see how our scalable programs can work for you and your customers.

If you are like many customer success managers, you are probably extremely focused on the question:

“Will our customers be successful with OUR software?”

You and your team probably ask yourselves what you, as a customer success professional, need to do to ensure the customer is successful using your product.

But there is a more critical, more fundamental question you need to ask first.

You need to ask, “Can our customer be successful with ANY software?”

Shifting focus is critical

By asking if the customer can be successful with any software, you are identifying if the customer has within its internal organization the knowledge, skills, experience, and capacity required to get maximum business value from its software investments.

You are identifying if the primary problem you need to solve first is related to your customers’ organizational capacity to adopt and benefit from any technology or if the major challenge is specific to your system.

Once you understand this crucial distinction between the customers’ ability to achieve success with any software versus their ability to achieve success with your specific software, you can focus and prioritize your CS efforts on the right things.

Here’s the problem

What may come as a big surprise to you, is that most buyers of software don’t know how to get their organizations to drive change, get their staff to adopt software effectively, and ensure they get the full business outcomes they expect.

The issue is not the software.

The issue is a lack of knowledge, experience, and expertise in driving new behaviors and ways of working across the organization to get the full value from the software.

When we train the buyers of software on user adoption techniques and practices, they are amazed at how many things they are doing wrong that prevent their success in getting value from software. The vast majority of these issues are people, organizational, and process issues. They are NOT specific to a given piece of software.

It doesn’t matter if it is a cloud system, on-premise, or a custom-built application. The crisis of effective user adoption is ubiquitous.

Here is the solution

Here are some questions you need to ask your customers to identify if the biggest blockers of customer success are tied to your specific product or are related to the customer’s internal ability to absorb any technology within their organizations:

What do you do internally to drive adoption and realize business benefits when implementing any new system? Do you have a defined user adoption program and methodology?
How do you ensure systems are quickly adopted and that you sustain effective adoption 3, 5, and 10 years down the road?
Across your software portfolio, what percent of applications are delivering the full business benefits and outcomes you expected? How many of the systems would you consider a mind-blowing business “success”? What makes them so incredible?
What prevents you from getting more value from your existing IT investments?
What will you do to ensure that your investment in our system is a success and delivers all of the business benefits you expect to achieve?
Where do you need our help to ensure that your investment in our system is a success and delivers all of the business benefits you expect to achieve?

What to expect…

What you will most likely hear from your customers is that they have a plethora of systems that are NOT successful.

The vast majority of their systems are likely underused or underperforming. There is probably a lot of value leakage in their existing IT investment portfolio.

Many of your prospects and customers likely provide a limited version of “change management” (typically focused around the go-live date). These are probably the customers that report very few systems delivering full business value.

It will be the rare gem of a customer that has a structured, ongoing program to sustain effective system use (and business outcomes realization) over a 5 – 10 year period. These forward-thinking companies are likely the ones that report high success rates across their software portfolio.

The red flag for your customer success approach

When asking these questions, you will quickly see that many of your customers are unlikely to achieve great success getting value from any system, not just your system.

When you encounter this, you need to ask yourself if there is something magically different about your software. What is the magic that will lead customers to achieve success with your software when they have proven time and time again, they struggle to adopt and get value from any system?

If your software is sans magic then, you need to offer a different approach to helping your customer achieve success.

Otherwise, your system will quickly become just another underwhelming investment in your customer’s software portfolio.

Solve the first problem first

Before you waste a ton of time, resources, and effort narrowly focusing on the success of your product, you will likely need to help your customers recognize that they need to address this fundamental capability gap within their organization first.

They will need to spend time learning the principles and practices of software adoption. Then they must adjust their internal efforts to get more value from any of their software investments. Only then will they even have the potential to get full value from their investment in your system.

Your customer will be amazed at how you helped them

Realizing this, you need to focus your customer success approach on building your customer’s capacity to adopt any system effectively. They will then apply this skill to adopt your system.

And then everyone wins.

There is also an added benefit for you from this approach. By enriching your customer’s capacity to adopt any system, you will tremendously differentiate your company and your customer success program from all of your competitors.

Your customer will view you as the coveted “trusted advisor.”

Your customer will give you rare references and reviews.

Your customers will renew and expand their accounts.

And you will amaze and delight your coworkers, managers, executives, and investors.

Everybody wins.

Learn more

Success Chain provides a variety of Customer Success and Software A doption training and consulting services to help buyers of software get full value from their IT investments.

Contact us to learn how we can help you or your customers increase their potential for software success and develop their internal software adoption programs and capacity that delivers success.