Where does customer success come from?

You may ask yourself: "Where does customer success come from? Why is this term being used in so many circles when discussing business objectives? What does it mean for my business and myself?"

Well, spoiler alert. Customer success is not a new concept or an idea recently conjured up in the business sense of the word. This practice has been around for many years. Organisations have invested countless hours and resources in research to provide customers with the best services. More often than not, customers, in turn, share their satisfaction levels with the service provider for services rendered.

Historically, service support was used as a lifeboat appearing on the horizon in times of crisis, reactive by nature. In other words, only once a proverbial iceberg has been struck and disaster imminent.

A well-known fact in today's fast-moving, always-on society is it would be beneficial if you had more than the legacy break/fix solution in an always-connected economy. Here is where customer success comes into its own. This is the next phase in the evolutionary services and software offering process and in demand in becoming a successful business.

The exact definition for customer success still varies depending on who you ask. At Nexio, it means the following in layman's terms: For us to retain our loyal customers, we have to make sure that those customers are getting the utmost value from our offerings, and, more importantly, we have to help them be as successful as possible. It is in our best interest to help our customers prosper and soar to greater heights.

We have seen the subscription economy is expanding into every market segment. This is enabling customers to engage with multiple vendors and their partners in ways without being mutually exclusive. Customers are genuinely spoiled for choice. As a preferred partner, if we do not adapt to this new way of doing business, we will be excluded from participating in the future economic arena.

To elaborate on the above-mentioned subscription economy, we know that historically, under a perpetual or capital expenditure model, software vendors and their partners would achieve most of the deal revenue in the first year. There is a power shift from vendor or partner to the purchaser or customer as the latter no longer has to absorb the investment's risk. With the perpetual model, unless there are managed services involved, the full risk of adoption lies with the customer. The customer is responsible for driving a project to completion and getting ROI or "bang for your buck" on investment.

With subscription models, the risk of successful adoption is shared mutually between vendor, partner and customer. For instance, if the onboarding cost of a customer evens out in year two, and a dissatisfied customer drifts to another partner in year one as a result of an awful experience, we as a partner will have severe profitability concerns. That is why the concept of customer lifetime value (LTV) is a significant one and why customer success has become mission-critical for us at Nexio. We are passionate, bordering on fanatical about ensuring our customers are successful in each step we take together.

You might also ask what are customer expectations when it comes to their success? And what should customer success bring to the table to help drive this success? In a nutshell, we believe customers want more value and achieve success much faster. Customer experience, in practice, can be unique to each company and division. However, its role in the bigger customer success picture can be seen as a department primarily focused on post-sales activities like customer onboarding, training, retention of the said customer, and account expansion through a successful adoption. Here Nexio's customer experiences enter the equation.

Customer success and customer experience are often mistakenly confused with each other. It is essential to know the difference and what sets them apart when managing customer expectations for each. What is the difference? Customer success works to understand and help customers achieve their goals and see value from our offering (based on actual data obtained by business tools). Customer experience focuses on specific interactions and revolves around how easy and enjoyable it is for customers to use our product or solution. It is a combination of the feelings, emotions and perceptions customers have of us and our overall performance when incorporating our products/service.You need both customer success and customer experience to prosper. While you might have a division focused on this, it has to be part of your DNA and culture as a company. We, as Nexio, will always aim to put the customer first with every engagement.

As Nexions, we understood that we had to put some "skin in the game" and so we re-looked, reworked and reinvested in our customer success strategy to recapture our customers' imagination of our brand of what's next and how this vision should materialise. Now we bring you a team with different backgrounds, the expertise to back and complement our offerings, making it fantastic to collaborate as a collective. With great customer experiences, we create your better tomorrow.