Customer Success Management (CSM) Practice

A Customer Success Management (CSM) Practice is a customer management practice that increases customer's product value.

• Context:
  • It can (typically) focus on improving Customer Retention by identifying and mitigating potential churn risks early.
  • It can (typically) incorporate Customer Onboarding processes to ensure smooth initial experiences with a product or service.
  • It can (often) use Customer Health Scores to monitor and assess the ongoing satisfaction and success of each customer.
  • It can (often) involve the proactive engagement of customers to increase Product Adoption and highlight value-adding features.
  • It can be supported by a Customer Success Management System.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • Square's CSM Practice, which focuses on improving customer outcomes through personalized onboarding and success strategies for their business solutions.
  • LegalOn's CSM Practice, where proactive client engagement and tailored customer journeys reduce churn and maximize the usage of their legal technology tools.
  • Salesforce's CSM Practice, which utilizes automated customer health scoring and personalized outreach to ensure high engagement and retention among its enterprise customers.
  • Zendesk's CSM Practice, known for focusing on customer experience metrics to drive usage expansion and reduce churn in its customer support software platform.
  • Adobe's CSM Practice, where the focus is on helping enterprise clients maximize the return on their investment in Adobe's creative and marketing products through strategic consulting and support.
  • Zoom's CSM Practice, which ensures continued growth by working closely with clients to expand usage of its video conferencing solutions, particularly with large-scale enterprise deployments.
  • HubSpot's CSM Practice, designed to help customers adopt its inbound marketing and sales platform by offering tailored onboarding and usage analytics to drive value realization.
  • Slack's CSM Practice, where CSM teams work to increase product stickiness by driving deeper usage of Slack's team collaboration tools across departments within client companies.
  • Microsoft Azure's CSM Practice, which provides technical support and success strategies to help enterprise clients fully utilize cloud services, ensuring the achievement of their business goals through cloud transformation.
  • Workday's CSM Practice, where customer success managers focus on helping customers navigate complex HR and financial systems, ensuring full adoption and reducing friction in transitioning to new cloud platforms.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Sales Practice, that focuses on closing deals.
  • a Cost-Reduction Practice.
  • a Product Management Practice.
• See: Customer Lifetime Value, Success (Concept), Customer Relationship Management, Product Advisory Council, Personalized Marketing.

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References

2023

• GBard
  • Customer Success Management (CSM) is both a process and a practice.
  • As a process, CSM is a series of steps that a company takes to ensure that its customers are successful in using its products or services. The CSM process typically includes the following stages:
    • Customer Onboarding: Helping new customers get up and running with the product or service.
    • Product Adoption: Helping customers learn how to use the product or service effectively.
    • Customer Value realization: Helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product or service.
    • Customer Retention: Preventing customers from churning (canceling their subscription).
    • Product Usage Expansion: Helping customers grow their usage of the product or service.
  • As a practice, CSM is a customer-centric approach to business that focuses on building long-term relationships with customers and helping them achieve their goals. CSM practitioners use a variety of tools and techniques to understand their customers' needs, identify and address potential risks, and provide proactive support.
  • Other ways to describe CSM: A customer engagement strategy, ...

2022

• (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_success Retrieved:2022-6-24.
  • Customer Success or Customer Success Management is a business method ensuring customers achieve success: their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. Effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased up-sell opportunities. The goal of Customer Success is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improves customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company.
  • QUOTE: ... On the more dramatic end, CSM represents the act of imbuing an agent/fiduciary orientation to customer management in industries that typically have a more arms-length relationship. In a fiduciary or agency type relationship, the seller concerns itself with proactively leading customers beyond simply utilizing the narrow offering provided by the seller. A redesign of organizational elements can enable this vision of CSM to be fully realized (Porter & Heppelmann, 2015).

2020

• (Hilton et al., 2020) ⇒ Bryson Hilton, Bita Hajihashemi, Conor M. Henderson, and Robert W. Palmatier. (2020). “Customer Success Management: The Next Evolution in Customer Management Practice?. ” Industrial marketing management 90
  • QUOTE:
    • Customer Success Management is a new customer management practice.
    • Customer Success Management is part of an evolution in customer management practices following CRM, Customer Engagement, and Customer Experience.
    • Customer Success Management often manifests as a new functional unit or job role in the firm
    • Customer Success Management proactively prioritizes customers' experience and engagement toward maximum value-in-use
    • Customer Success Management draws upon goal management, stakeholder management, and learning management research streams.

2016

• (Mehta et al., 2016) ⇒ Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy. (2016). “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue.” John Wiley & Sons.

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