You can't purchase a piece of enterprise software today without also being solicited to consider purchasing an additional Customer Success package. Companies will tell you that you need it to be successful, that it will help you in your implementation, provide prescriptive guidance, and that it will ensure that you get the full value out of your investment, but will it? Software vendors talk about Customer Success, but do they really mean it? In this article I'm going to break down what a genuine Customer Success offering looks like, how it differs from reactive customer service (aka Support), and how to recognize red flags when the offering is more self-serving than valuable.

What Is Customer Success?

A dictionary definition of Customer Success is a proactive, strategic approach to ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product or service.

Pay close attention to that statement "achieve their desired outcomes", because we're going to come back to it shortly.

The concept of Customer Success is widely credited to the mid-1990s and a company called Vantive, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company. Vantive's CEO, John Luongo, and his partner Marie Alexander are often cited as pioneers in proactively ensuring that their customers achieved their desired outcomes with Vantive's products. They set about this effort by proactively documenting customer expectations and then conducting regular reviews to align on various success metrics their customers were using.

Why did Vantive want their customers to achieve their desired outcomes? Was it because they wanted those customers to ultimately be successful and therefore spread the word of how Vantive helped them accomplish those outcomes? Maybe. Clearly, you want positive word-of-mouth for your products making them easier to sell to the next customer, but there is likely an ulterior motive behind wanting customers to be successful with your products: it makes them "sticky" and you'll be less likely to churn.

This is very different from either Customer Service (aka Support) which is reactive, issue-based, and most commonly break/fix only; or Account Management which is focused on selling you more products.

In order to truly understand Customer Success as a function of a business, you first have to understand what Customer Success is not. The differences between these offerings can tell you WHY a company is offering you Customer Success and whether it's in your best interest to pay them for it. Throughout this article, I'll help you understand what a typical Customer Success program should look like and more importantly how to spot the ones you most certainly do not want to purchase.

A Strong Customer Success Offering

Effective Customer Success is broken into multiple parts; spend time understanding how your offering supports each of these areas of your business:

  • Proactive Engagement: Regular checkpoints with your Customer Success team around value assessments, where they are showing you the value of what you're achieving from your investment. These aren't done just when you have renewals, they're done quarterly (or monthly) throughout your contract.
    RED FLAG: There should be actionable usage data from everything you've purchased. They're a SaaS company, they have the data, they should be sharing it with you so you know exactly how much you're using, where there are opportunities to improve, and where there's waste. If this isn't being done proactively, you should demand that it's included in your contract.

  • Success Planning: When you purchased your product or service, did you have a plan for implementation of everything you bought? Is it all on a roadmap and being executed? Did you have an implementation partner selected and vetted? Your Customer Success team should be providing all of this and should be co-authoring those plans.
    RED FLAG: These plans should include not only milestones and business objectives, but the actual success metrics that show that you've succeeded. If they don't have that well-defined and specific to you, it's not a success plan.

  • Customer Education: An onboarding experience that is beyond what a typical customer receives, including customized training plans for your team, implementation recommendations, best practices, and a tailored experience that walks you through everything you need to know to implement.
    RED FLAG: You should be getting enhanced training beyond that of a typical customer, because you're paying for Customer Success. Can the company articulate what that enhanced training is?

  • Alignment with Product and Support: Your Customer Success team is your advocate inside of their company. They're bringing you directly into touch with Product and Support people, sharing internal roadmaps, and working with you to specifically prevent support issues.
    RED FLAG: You've provided multiple product enhancement suggestions, but no one can tell you where they are in the product lifecycle or if they'll ever see the light of day.

  • Metrics that Matter: You should be receiving regular (monthly at a minimum) customer health scores, time-to-value reports, product adoption reports, and outcome realization reports. Ideally, all of these are in a dashboard provided to you, so you can see them in real-time anytime you need the information.
    RED FLAG: In order to provide these metrics to you, your Customer Success team needs a lot of your time; they can't exist without your input.

When Customer Success Isn't

Here are specific areas where, if you see them in your offering, you should re-evaluate the value of that offering and likely shift your investment elsewhere.

Support

Customer Success is not support. Support at a Software-as-a-Service company exists for one reason and one reason only: break and fix. The reasons you might need support are:

  • The software they've sold you is documented poorly (if at all) and you can't figure out how to implement it properly, or know if it's working.
  • The software doesn't work the way the documentation states it should, or is not working at all.
  • The service is literally not working (outage) or has bugs.

All of these reasons have one thing in common: none of them are the customer's fault.

You should only be paying for support under very specific circumstances:

  1. The company is offering enhanced support where they will actually spend time helping to debug your customizations.
  2. They are offering "hands on keyboard" and will go into your environment to make changes to your implementation.
  3. You have needs that are far beyond their "typical" customers and require things like dedicated support agents embedded in your business, or response times that a typical customer doesn't require; or better, contractual resolution times.

If you're ever told that you have to buy Customer Success in order to get basic Support (even 24x7), then you're being sold Support, not Customer Success.

Adoption

Customer Success is not about adoption. Now don't get me wrong, you need to have adoption of what you've purchased in order to fully realize the value of what you bought, and a good Customer Success team will absolutely help you with education and enablement on the things you've deployed (as I mentioned above). The distinction is this: if your Customer Success team's primary mission is driving adoption of capabilities you haven't deployed yet, that's not Customer Success, that's revenue protection for the vendor. The focus of your adoption efforts should be on the capabilities that you've already deployed or have on a short-term roadmap. Ultimately, if you have an adoption issue then one of two things have happened, both of which require re-investment, not Customer Success:

  1. You've been oversold. This is usually the primary reason that your adoption is low. You have products or capabilities that were sold to you, that maybe you didn't even realize you were buying, and you have no stated goal for using them. That's a problem for your vendor, because that means you'll de-book (cancel or remove) the capability, and should, so they are marshaling Customer Success to drive that adoption at your expense.
  2. You've overbought. This is less likely, but it happens. Your "eyes were bigger than your stomach", or you had resourcing problems, or you couldn't get the investment in implementation services you were counting on. In all cases, if you've overbought, you should downsell — reduce what you're paying for to match what you can actually use. There's no reason to pay for something you're not able to use, and the money you're spending on a subscription-based capability that is undeployed should be spent on deploying things that will immediately drive value.

Over-reliance on Automation

Customer Success cannot be easily automated. The most valuable Customer Success programs are those that are tailored to your specific business needs. While things like dashboards and metric gathering can be automated, what you want to look out for is the use of automation to deliver "value" to you. If you're receiving canned emails that miss the mark, or you're talking to a portal instead of a person, that company is over-reliant on automation.

One-Size-Fits-All Playbooks and Canned Experiences

Just as with over-reliance on automation, one-size-fits-all playbooks are another red flag for your Customer Success program. If you're seeing a menu of "offerings" and you have to pick things from that menu, or your Customer Success team is taking you through activities that don't have tangible and specific outcomes that you believe are valuable, then you're receiving a Playbook. The work you do with your Customer Success team should be bespoke and tailored to your specific needs. When you receive the final deliverable it should not only resonate with you, but it should also be actionable within a short time period. Too often, you'll receive deliverables from a Customer Success team that look and feel right in the moment, but that are still sitting on a shelf, collecting dust, 6 months later. Worse, you find yourself having to repeat it.

Lack of Cross-Functional Influence

One of the primary benefits of having a Customer Success team supporting you is that they are your internal advocates at the company. You should be first in line to provide product feedback, receiving roadmap updates, and understanding exactly where your defects and enhancement requests stand. It is this very "access to experts" that you're paying to receive and that which non-paying customers rarely receive. Make sure that it's not only documented as a benefit, but that you're actually receiving it. If your product enhancements and defects are falling into a "black hole", then you don't have the access you're paying to receive.

The Litmus Test

In Chemistry, you have a litmus test strip that tells you of the presence of a base or an acid. It's an indicator that you have something that you can't see visibly, so you need to test for it.

The Customer Success litmus tests are simple:

  1. Ask your Customer Success team to articulate the value they've provided in the last month, quarter, year. They should be able to respond within 24 hours, ideally with a dashboard already in place and provided to you that shows it.
  2. Ask your Customer Success team to articulate your platform health, adoption level, and license usage. These should not only be readily available, but should all be in a dashboard already. This is ALL telemetry data that the company already has, so exposing it to you should be simple.
  3. Ask your Customer Success team for the business outcomes you're working to achieve. At first, this might seem unfair, but realize that you were sold these products and services. That sales process already uncovered the business outcomes you wanted to achieve — that's how they sold it to you — so your Customer Success team should already have these at hand. If they don't, it's an indicator that Customer Success is not engrained in the overall customer lifecycle at that company.

If any of these tests fail, then you don't have Customer Success, you have Customer Service. And if that's the case, you have a decision to make: renegotiate the terms of your Customer Success engagement to include the things that are missing, or redirect that investment into implementation services or additional capability that will drive immediate, measurable value for your business.

Before You Sign

Before you purchase any Customer Success offering, you need to evaluate what you're going to be getting from that program. If you've already bought, it's not too late to perform this evaluation:

  1. Look for case studies and success stories. These should already be readily available. If the company has been successful with their Customer Success platform they should be swimming in positive references. Ask for a reference from someone in one of those case studies. Make sure you're actually talking to the people at that reference company who are involved in the day-to-day operations of the service, not just an executive who may have other reasons for providing a good reference.
  2. Customer Zero usage; does the company demonstrate effective use of their own products? Make sure you ask about how much they've customized vs. used the out-of-box product. You need to ask for a site visit to show how they're being used and be sure to ask for their value metrics, how they measure success, and what actual outcomes they've realized. They have full access to the product, the engineering teams, the product managers, and all of the documentation; if they're struggling, you will too.
  3. Ask what success looks like for your provider. Do they talk about their product, or do they focus on your business outcomes and goals?
  4. Ask for a sample Customer Success Plan. This should be immediately available and when you read it, you should be able to visualize clearly how it will help you in achieving your business outcomes.
  5. Ask how they segment and prioritize customers. Does having Customer Success avail you to better overall outcomes? What are they? You should be able to clearly articulate what you're getting for the money you're paying; otherwise, spend it on implementation services.
  6. Inquire about renewal and churn processes. What happens when customers struggle? What resources are brought in, at no charge, to support those customers through those times? Are these bespoke and tailored to your situation, or are they generic and one-size-fits-all?

Conclusion

At its best, Customer Success is a strategic partnership rooted in mutual growth. It's not just about answering questions or keeping customers from churning — it's about making sure they achieve the outcomes they came for in the first place. A genuine Customer Success team will feel like an extension of your own, not just another department checking boxes.

If you take nothing else away from this article, take the litmus tests. Run them. If your Customer Success team can't articulate the value they've delivered, can't show you your own platform health data, or doesn't know the business outcomes you're working toward, then what you have isn't Customer Success — it's a line item on your invoice. Redirect that investment into something that will actually move the needle for your business.

In a world where everyone says they're customer-centric, the ones who actually deliver on that promise stand out — and they're the ones with whom you should stick.