The Evolution of Customer Success

The Evolution of Customer Success

Before the Internet, customer interactions post-sales were slower. Think call centers and switchboards. With this limitation, it is understandable how customer-centric verticals weren’t a high priority back then. After all, getting in touch with someone was already quite a challenge, and the technology just wasn’t there yet.

Then, in 1991, the World Wide Web opened many doors for the customer. Customers could now quickly communicate with companies even after business hours, and companies could more easily distribute information. First came email customer support and, not long after, live chat support. With the rapid innovation in communication technology, more sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) tools allowed companies to track their customers more efficiently and scale their business. By the 2000s, the rise of online help desks and self-help allowed customers to get support faster and on-demand, which saved time for both the customer and the company. However, as the Internet became more accessible and prevalent, customers could compare companies more effortlessly and make the switch to another company just as quickly. It became far too easy for customers to switch between companies in the SaaS model, which meant that revenue – mainly that was supposed to come from renewals and upsells – tanked. 

This was serious, and companies needed a way to respond. Retention was vital for the subscription economy. For the business to grow, senior management teams started to recognize that they needed a new function within the company to address this. 

While there were several companies trying to solve these issues with teams that may not have been called “Customer Success,” the first customer success department recorded was in 1996 at – surprisingly enough – a non-SaaS company called Vantive. Though they collected all of the money from the sale upfront, Vantive was a CRM company whose business model relied heavily on referrals. They would often walk into sales pitches, throw down a list of Vantive customers in front of a potential client, and invite them to call any of the customers on the list to hear about Vantive. This meant that each of those customers on the list had to be satisfied at all times; a failed implementation or any dissatisfaction among these customers would be unacceptable and potentially fatal. To make sure that this was never an issue, John Luongo, Vantive’s CEO at the time, had created a new department called “Customer Success” and introduced them during the sales handoff, “This is the customer success team that’s going to ensure that you’re successful in using Vantive. And their compensation is based on your success.”Vantive then used this department to understand better how success with Vantive was defined in each of their customer’s eyes and to manage customer expectations better. Every six months, the client would meet with their assigned customer success team, and they would discuss whether Vantive had met the previously mentioned expectations and bring up any concerns. Vantive found success in this customer retention strategy, and the customer success department grew to include customer support, documentation, and training. 

In the past, customer success-like roles did exist in some capacity, but were not necessarily called “customer success” nor empowered as they are now. They may have been called customer experience, account management, project management, or customer support. While those roles also still exist today, customer success takes cues from each of them to become an even better advocate for and an advisor to the customer. Customer success is a relatively new industry, roughly only a decade old. There have since been an explosion of content, thought leadership, and ideas. This is all very exciting; however, because customer success has almost grown somewhat organically within every organization, and each customer success organization comes in with a very different perspective. What this means is that each product represents an experience that extends far beyond just the product. It now also includes brand recognition and proactive customer support, among other things, to make sure that you have the best experience possible with the company as a whole.