The role of customer success has become increasingly recognised as an important facet of operations, with many businesses appointing dedicated customer success managers. But is this a true top-down operational change or more for marketing purposes?
Ross Williams, Chief Success Officer at Virsae, told UC Today that MSPs need to engage with the concept of customer success and what that truly means for their own processes.
“Most organisations that are transitioning into customer success are just changing the titles of a few people and there's nothing more to it than that,” he stated.
“There are a whole lot of new metrics that need to be introduced to do this properly: monthly recurring revenue, revenue churn, customer churn, average revenue per user, average revenue per account and lifetime value. If you're clever with this, ultimately the lifetime value of a customer will be much higher than your traditional break-fix business.”
Williams said that many organisations that are implementing customer success strategies are not doing so in a meaningful fashion, describing it as a repurposing of service delivery. True customer success managers require a new source of insight, skills and training.
“If you are changing from being a service delivery manager to a customer success manager, you really should have full training – you’re becoming an account manager as well,” he explained.
“Customer success managers should have revenue targets that include net revenue retention. The monthly recurring revenue, year to year, for that account should be increasing, so they should be selling more in terms of services, value add or the integration of other components into that mix. It is a major skills change, not just a relabelling of titles.”
