The Seven Pillars of Customer Success: A Proven Framework to Drive Impactful Client Outcomes for Your Company

The ability to get a customer to adopt your software is one of the most preeminent components of retention, expansion, and advocacy; through training and certifications, software adoption was the main function of my job.

leading customers to success. (A lot more on this later in this book.)

Then you need to bury the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) by making it easy for them to switch. Maybe you provide them with a cheat sheet? Or you could work with marketing to create a video or reference card with training tips that translate easily for the user. Remember, you aren’t

I also learned that customer success was much broader than the customer success function itself, because I managed all the internal teams responsible for enabling a successful customer. I learned where customer success needed to integrate and share metrics with other functions within the company to amplify its ability to be effective, impactful, an

Finally, I have seen CSMs manage the entire renewal process. In addition to their regular responsibilities (such as understanding and driving value, creating operational dependence, nurturing and finding advocates, etc.), they are also responsible for the renewal transaction with the customer. This means upselling, cross-selling, changes to SLAs, a

Chief Customer Officer, which gave insight into how customer-facing functions operated. This included areas such as support, training, renewals, and customer success.

built an algorithm called EWS (early warning system) that factored in over 120 different inputs to calculate a customer health score.

At a super-high confidence level, this score predicted customer churn nine months in advance giving their customer success team enough time to change the paradigm and retain their customers. It also predicted potential problems, triggered notifications to the right people, and delivered playbooks of proven best practices in order to solve those pro

Customer retention means being continuously focused on the customers’ desired outcomes. It means understanding your customers thoroughly, more than just their goals and desired outcomes. You need to know their personalities. Is the stakeholder driven by ego? Are they altruistic? Recognizing these nuances will change the way you approach an account.