Where do you see the future of customer success heading?

1. Customer Success will become more and more metrics-driven. Without performance standards, it is very difficult to show the true value of CS to the organization.

2. Proactive experience and Personalization: believe the future of customer success will continue to focus on providing a personalized and proactive customer experience. This will involve using data and technology to gain a deep understanding of individual customer needs and preferences, and using that information to identify and address potential issues proactively. 

3. Scale and Digitization: Built-in customer success within the product will likely explode in the next few years especially due to the emphasis on doing more with less. Take Slack, for example. Any important new feature is announced within the Slack platform. Same goes for user trainings. There is no CSM conducting training sessions every time Slack releases a new feature.

4. Collaboration with Sales and NRR: Given the economic headwinds, most of the new revenue will come from upselling/cross-selling to your existing install base. Relationships with sales and identifying CSQLs (Customer Success Qualified Leads) will become one of the core motions for CS.

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5. Product and Customer Success Collaboration: Any product team that is not listening to CS and building products in isolation is doing it wrong. CSMs are a wealth of information and feedback from customers, including sponsors, executives, and end-users. They are in a prime position to speak about which features are exciting to customers, which are being used frequently, and which miss the mark based on customers’ goals.

6. AI and Machine learning: If you have witnessed the power of ChatGPT in action, it will be apparent to you that the future of any product/business out there will have a component of AI and ML in it. Regenerative AI and analytic-driven AI will become an integral part of CS solutioning. AI tools such as ChatGPT can be trained to become a powerful tool that can be used to enhance the capabilities of customer success teams, by automating routine tasks, providing accurate and fast responses (through training on commonly asked questions), and uncovering valuable insights from customer interactions.

Great question.

Customer Success is continuing to grow & mature. I see more of a focus on customer value and actual quantifiable outcomes and how these drive the customers company financial performance. Customers are looking to customer success to help them articulate and measure value. Leveraging customer advocacy to drive expansion and new logos  is also becoming more important.

Scale continues to be a challenge and focus area. How to segment the customer base and appropriately assign CSMs for human interaction. High / Mid Touch versus pooled CSMs and Digital / Automated Touch. We need to have channels of engagement for all customers but doing it cost effectively. 

I see Customer Success becoming more company wide rather than a stand alone function. It is operationalized across the whole company and becomes a company-wide team effort with CSMs at the forefront. Customer Success is reporting into the C-Suite at the Chief Customer (Success) Officer level who in turn reports to the CEO. 

There is increasing use of technology. The use of telemetry will be critical to track product usage, feature adoption and user consumption. And of course the use of AI will be critical to increase efficiency and scale. AI will work alongside customer success, not replace it.

I would also like to share a few articles that I believe cover many of the areas I would consider.

https://www.customersuccesscollective.com/10-trends-that-will-shape-customer-success-in-2023/

https://successcoaching.co/blog/12-predictions-for-customer-success-in-2023

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/articles/trends-in-customer-success-strategy.html 

The future for customer success is incredibly bright!

The role of CS is becoming increasingly important both for organisations and for customers. Customer retention and loyalty are the lifeblood of healthy organisations and CS directly drives these outcomes through making sure customers derive value from their investment.

Exceptional customer success can act as a core differentiator in market and by investing in CS, organisations can realise benefits not only in terms of retention and engagement but also in terms of expansion and net new customer sales as superior service can be a compelling reason to buy.

For the organisation this means CS is pivotal to both revenue growth and customer experience.

On the customer side customer success often acts as they key conduit for customer feedback and insight, this data informs product development decisions, continuous improvement investments and improves the organisations ability to anticipate customer needs.

Customer success can also be powerful partners in terms of sharing industry best practice, connecting customers with one another and ensuring the customer achieves their outcomes and can demonstrate ROI fro their investment.

The advancements in AI should also free up time for CSMs to add additional value to their customers through automation and efficiency gains in administrative tasks.

I see several trends happening;

• Business models will continue to evolve to be more customer-centric based on usage. This means that landing the customer will be aligned to a specific skill set, but there will be more overlap across AEs and CSMs to lead the customer from the initial landing to growing them into larger customers. I see that either CSMs or AEs will lead the relationship in the future, not both and that their KPIs will be more aligned towards customer retention and expansion.

• CSMs will carry more extensive portfolios. In B2B tech, there has been a trend towards larger CSM books of business as customer data platforms improve, with health and signal capturing improving in the medium term. This suggests that CSMs will be better equipped to manage more customers due to having a better understanding of what's happening (from a signal/warning system) across their customer portfolios, allowing them to operate at a higher volume.

• AI supporting portfolio management at scale - we have already seen several companies begin to automate away support queries via AI. This will spill over to CSMs quickly for more of the transactional part of the CSM role, allowing CSMs to have larger books of business due to AI being able to drive intelligent sequences to keep customers engaged whilst CSMs can focus on on the higher impact, more creative problems of how to make their customers thrive at a more strategic level.

• I think customers will continue to expect quick yet complex answers - our products and platforms will need to be able to keep up by offering more access and self-service options. CSMs need to be able to respond with speed and accuracy, which means they need to know the product themselves. 

• I see CS moving to a multi-support model using chat (both chatbot and live-hosted), AI, and large language models, with CSMs for some accounts, pod support for others. 

• In my opinion, for CS to remain a highly valued function to the customer, we have to make sure products are stable, data is accurate, systems are integrated, access is easy, and privacy is protected.