Over the past few years, organizations have quickly realized the importance of value realization for customer success–as well as the untapped
potential for customer success as a revenue-generating function. A natural extension of value-based selling, value realization enables customers to see the real business value that your solution provides to their organization. As such,value realization has become instrumental to ensuring customer retention, predicting and mitigating customer churn, and identifying cross and up-selling opportunities at existing accounts. However, despite the clear need to provide customers with value realization frameworks, many organizations still don’t have the resources in place to successfully execute–and scale–value realization across their customer base. The next big thing organizations must focus on is scaling their customer success programs by leveraging the right people and the right tech.
What’s Next: Scaling Value Realization and Customer Success
In the near term, organizations must focus their value realization strategies on a two-pronged approach: 1) Building out their customer success and customer success operations team with the appropriate roles and leadership to support value realization at scale, and 2) implementing the right technology to empower their customer success teams and digitize their value realization frameworks. With the right people and technology in place, organizations will be better equipped to quickly and effectively scale their customer success programs, increase customer retention and satisfaction, and maximize revenue across their entire portfolio.
1. Investment in Customer Success Operations
The first big thing on the horizon is the need to invest in customer success staff. While hiring in today’s competitive job market might be intimidating, the value of a dedicated customer success team and customer success operations leader cannot be understated. A well-staffed customer success team provides customers with a proactive advocate for their success–a personal guide to help customers make the most of your solution and realize its full potential. As you scale and add headcount to your customer success teams, a Customer Success Operations (CS Ops) Manager will quickly become an essential role to fill. A CS Ops Manager is a key leader that puts structure, tools, and processes in place to help your customer success team operate as efficiently as possible by streamlining operations, preventing communication breakdowns, and removing barriers. According to the Customer Success Collective, “Having a well-supported, highly-functioning customer success team at the behest of a Customer Success Operations Manager, means that the customers will have the full attention of the CS team, enabling them to fulfill their goals. A successful CS team will reduce churn rates, promote customer retention and generate a greater sense of customer satisfaction.”
2. Digitization of Value Realization
People are a key component to scale customer success and value realization framework, but they’re only half the equation. Equally critical, your customer success teams must be empowered by the right digital technologies and tools. Digital value realization platforms like Ecosystems make it easy for CS
teams to demonstrate value to customers at every step–from initial onboarding to renewal conversations. For example, digitization allows CS teams to quickly and easily turn the customers’ value journey into a digital record shared by both Sales and Customer Success, joint visibility that is key to customer retention and expansion. In addition, Ecosystems is the only value-selling platform certified by Gainsight as “integrated,” enabling a seamless hand-off from Sales to Customer Success. Value realization digitization improves the efficiency and effectiveness of customer success teams while providing clear visibility into customer success and possible risks across all touchpoints and relevant teams. This enables CS teams to be more proactive, maximize positive results, and mitigate customer concerns before they escalate.
Conclusion
The next big thing in value realization is here: it’s investing in tech-empowered people to execute value realization at scale. With greater visibility into customer success across the entire business, CS teams can capitalize on opportunities to expand business within key customer accounts, as well as proactively move the needle for accounts at risk–ultimately reducing costly customer turnover and maximizing revenue. For more information on value realization or how this approach can work for your organization, we invite you to schedule a demo or contact our team of experts. We are here, ready to help. Not ready to chat yet? Check out this video clip on how Delphix Scales Value Conversations from Sales to Customer Success.
