In SaaS we talk a lot about sticky features: those product features that customers use so consistently, they literally become the workflow.
We don’t talk about whether or not customer success is sticky, and that’s a problem. We were lurking on a recent Reddit thread where customers of a particular vendor were debating the merits of that vendor’s customer success offerings. The discussion took the shape of a feature breakdown, with customers advising each other on which parts were useful — and which were a waste of money.
Amid our playbooks and methodologies, we tend to forget that customer success is like any other offering or feature: your customers will ‘adopt’ it if they think it’s value-add, and reject it if not. Many SaaS companies tend to look at a customer’s engagement with customer success through the lens of overall renewal risk, but don’t stop to consider whether customer success itself is valuable enough to be sticky.
What makes customer success ‘sticky’?
- First, there’s a clear value-add for the customer, explicitly defined, for every touchpoint. ‘Check-ins’ aren’t sticky, unless the customer just needs a venue for complaint. Take a look at each of your CS touchpoints. Is there clear and concrete value-add for the customer in every one of them? Do they know what it is?
- Second, it’s not entirely (or even majority-) dependent on access to the CSM. We’re often surprised by the data that SaaS providers don’t make available to their customers through always-on digital ‘admin consoles’ — whether performance data, adoption data, automated and personalized insights, value calculations — that help individual customers get the most out of the software.
- Third, it brings a ‘one stop shop’ ethic to customer interactions. Supporting complex customers always requires a cast of characters, from implementation teams to support to engineering and technical experts. But we’re surprised at how often SaaS companies approach this as a matter of handoffs, rather than as a matter of orchestration, through a single POC. In the digital space, the same is true: do customers have to navigate through a thicket of different sites, or can they find their answers through a single, easily navigable front door?
- Fourth, customer success needs to come armed with resources and expertise in organizational change management. We don’t talk about this much, but we’d argue that CS hasn’t invested nearly enough in change management methodologies and tools to aid customers, despite knowing well that this is where many year-one implementations and adoption programs fail. This doesn’t mean that CSMs need to be certified in OCM, but we remain surprised by the number of success planning efforts we see that fail to appreciate or diagnose the change management burden that many customers face, and also fail to help alleviate that burden.
Do your customers consider your CS program ‘sticky’? Talk to us about an assessment we can run for your team and program.