Customer Success Is A Culture.... Not a Department

Customer Success Is A Culture | NOT A Department

Customer success is one of those words that make business people in SaaS startups question the difference between account management and customer support, but there is a difference, trust me (or don’t, just read on). First and foremost, the content that I’ll be presenting is anti-fluff. What does that mean? You won’t be reading and learning theoretical strategies, but practical and actionable items you can copy and paste into your business and startup right away.

Customer success is a culture, NOT a department. Everyone in your company including your assistants and Google Adwords specialists must have the customer success culture. Let’s talk a little philosophy for a minute, what is customer success? In my opinion, customer success is treating every customer as if they were your first buyers. It means that you are still willing to go the “extra mile” and provide a phenomenal customer experience during the lifecycle of the customer.

Here’s a formula that you should apply to your business ASAP:

Happy Customers = A Happy Business

Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Customer success in a SaaS startup starts with the hiring process. Your company culture should be a requirement for all new employees. The reason you want to do this is because your new employees will be the ones speaking to the customers and representing the brand. I cannot understand why so many successful companies like MetroPCS and Salesforce have such poor customer support (try calling their tech support line and you’ll see what I mean). By the way, I do not see a difference between customer success and support - both mean the same thing because both have an end goal of making customers happy, it’s simple.

How can you hold every person in your company accountable for customer success?

1. Have every employee shadow each department and handle customer inquiries once a month. I’m serious, even your marketing team should be answering inbound calls (even if they don’t know the answers) in the sales and the tech support department.
2. Appoint each individual in your departments as quality assurance managers. This means, work as a team and make sure your employees pick up the slack for others. It’s not everyone for themselves. If you have a ticketing system like Zendesk then have your quality assurance managers review the responses your customers are receiving from your employees.
3. Give amazing customer service to your employees. That’s right, happy employees = happy customers so treat your employees with as much (if not more) importance than your customers because they’re the true brand ambassadors and influence paying subscribers.

Does this mean you should not have a customer success department?

Yes and No. Not all SaaS companies have customer success departments, many do. The larger a company grows the more likely it will need branches of specialized departments to handle the volume. I bet that when you started your business, you were the customer support, billing, sales, marketing and HR department for a while until your company grew. Eventually, these departments branched out as demand grew. Even if you built out a customer success department to handle the load, “customer success” should still be a mentality among your other departments. I mentioned this earlier, even your marketing team should be customer success. Imagine if your marketing team understood your customers with the same level of context as your sales and customer support reps? What type of marketing and email campaigns do you think you’ll have in return? Your business’s customer success team is the entire company, it’s a brand ambassador.

If you’re a business owner that preaches the improvement of customer success, but doesn’t follow suit with your employees then you’re not being a leader. Lead by example and demonstrate patience, flexibility, kindness, and empathy with your employees - the same traits you would display with your customers.