The Rise of Customer Success
83% of Customer Success teams saw growth in team size within the last year according to survey results released by Totango just this week. Meanwhile, a recent analysis of LinkedIn data found nearly 20,000 open jobs for Customer Success Managers- representing a 31% open job/existing job ratio. Why is Customer Success seeing so much growth? The rise of the B2B SaaS business model has led companies to put a greater emphasis on the value customers receive from their products and services.
Put down the floppy disk and deliver value
In the traditional software business model customers made huge upfront investments towards installing and implementing new software. Remember how hard it was to install a new program using a floppy disk? Consider how complicated and time consuming that process would be on an enterprise-scale. These high switching costs were paired with long term contracts that further disincentivized incumbent software companies from focusing on delivering value to their customers. B2B SaaS disrupted the status quo by offering easy to install (often cloud based) software with less commitment and lower switching costs.
However, the ease and flexibility this new generation of software company relied on could also be their downfall. If customers weren’t seeing success with one company, they would cancel and try another. Software companies began to recognize that the success of their existing customers had a compounding effect on their own success. As B2B SaaS companies have dedicated more resources towards helping their customers see value, the field of Customer Success was born.
Has Customer Success piqued your interest? Read more
- 5 Customer Success questions- answered
- Customer Success and Support aren’t the same thing
- Hiring for Customer Success teams
- When and how to make your first Customer Success hire
- Customer Success metrics that matter
- Scaling Customer Success
- Customer Success tools to help you scale
- Creating a customer health score
