With the advent of modern technologies businesses are having to find new paths to outperform their competitors. This has caused innovation with new technologies and has forced the legacy principles of business and industry to be looked at in a new light.
From the blacksmiths of antiquity, to the advent of the assembly line to the proliferation of advanced pattern recognition and Artificial Intelligence, the thread we see pass through all of these processes of construction is that the speed of delivery and satisfaction of the customer have always driven advancement.
At the turn of 2020 a new term started to penetrate the business markets within the operational departments. The term was ‘Customer Success’. This term led to a change in both operational processes and staffing decisions when delivering products or services to customers.
Customer Success, unlike operational processes such as Service Operation Procedures(SOPs), Service Level Agreements, Sales Funnels or Agile Development processes is a principle rather than title or business process.
Management within sales and operational roles may not be able to articulate Customer success words however it is evident that they understand the principles when you look at hire practices and the change or roles within the Modern IT sector. Titles such as ‘Technical Account Manager’ and ‘Customer Success Manager’ typically bridge the gap between the nontechnical sales and account management teams with the operational side of the business. This is most evident with IT sectors such as SaaS and PaaS from where I have drawn my experience.
Within the Software development environment, regardless of sector or function of software being developed there are key steps that businesses have identified.
- Customer Need
- Product Development
- Marketing
- Sales Funnel
- Product Demonstration
- Sales Pricing
- Sales Agreement
- Product Deployment
- Product Delivery and User
When looking at the most successful businesses of the 2020s all major players have perfected this process. This is a process which I call End-to-End Customer Success.
Businesses such as Elon Musks’ ‘Tesla’ and particularly ‘SpaceX’ are perfect demonstrations for this End-to-End thinking. The Customer needs, product, pricing and continual improvement of the product by physical and non-physical updates has led to Tesla and SpaceX being leaders in their field.
The identification of needs, product processes, sales, delivery and aftersale support are all what modern businesses industry are calling ‘Customer Success’. What separates businesses who understand this to the ones that don’t is that each step is not necessarily ‘customer focused’ (as this can lead to excess resource consumption) but ‘optimized’ for the delivery of the answer to the customer’s need.
The advent of Uber in the UK is a prime example of this principle, while generally more expensive the ease of access to services(Taxis and transportation) outshone the legacy business patterns of a phone based booking service. The customer need ‘Getting transport’ was executed in an easily consumable way and the delivery of the service was simple and efficient. This eventually led to the downfall of many private hire services as Uber absorbed the market share due to an optimized service delivery.
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