Customer success: what it means and how to gauge it

The Cus­tomer Suc­cess Asso­ci­a­tion – a mem­ber­ship body com­pris­ing more than 55,000 spe­cial­ists in the field – describes cus­tomer suc­cess (CS) as “a long-term, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly engi­neered and pro­fes­sion­al­ly direct­ed busi­ness strat­e­gy to increase sus­tain­able, proven prof­itabil­i­ty for both the cus­tomers and the com­pa­ny.”

In essence, effec­tive CS entails build­ing good rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers, under­stand­ing their needs and ensur­ing that what your busi­ness offers them meets those needs so well that they keep com­ing back for more.

Most com­pa­nies will apply a whole range of CS mea­sures to get an accu­rate pic­ture of how much it costs to acquire and keep cus­tomers, how they feel about the company’s per­for­mance, how long they are like­ly to remain cus­tomers and what will hap­pen when they leave. Pop­u­lar met­rics include first-con­tact res­o­lu­tion rate, cus­tomer acqui­si­tion cost and net pro­mot­er score (NPS). Churn rate is wide­ly seen as one of the most impor­tant ones to track, as it’s the ulti­mate sig­ni­fi­er of whether cus­tomers are hap­py or not. 

Hol­ly Ainger, mar­ket­ing direc­tor at Nuffield Health, explains that the met­rics can be clas­si­fied into “two buck­ets: acqui­si­tion and reten­tion. For acqui­si­tion, you’d be look­ing at the return on invest­ment against var­i­ous above-the-line and below-the-line media chan­nels, includ­ing econo­met­ric mod­el­ling and look­ing at ‘test and learn’. For reten­tion, it’s very much based on churn, NPS and activ­i­ties that keep your cus­tomers ‘sticky’.” 

Weight­Watch­ers is anoth­er com­pa­ny that uses “a vari­ety of met­rics, as they are not all cre­at­ed equal”, accord­ing to its vice-pres­i­dent of growth and per­for­mance mar­ket­ing, Tony Miller. 

“We tend to focus on those that dri­ve longer-term busi­ness out­comes – for instance, cus­tomer life­time val­ue against cus­tomer acqui­si­tion cost and over­all sign-up num­bers – bal­anced with those that dri­ve life­time val­ue and the ratio of new to return­ing cus­tomers,” he says.

Miller’s com­ments are time­ly in light of research pub­lished recent­ly by the Data and Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion and Sales­force, which has found defi­cien­cies in the mea­sure­ment tools and tech­niques wide­ly used by mar­keters. Their Mean­ing­ful Mar­ket­ing Mea­sure­ment 2022 report reveals that organ­i­sa­tions have been using as many as 170 met­rics to artic­u­late the effec­tive­ness of their cam­paigns, 41% of which are “dig­i­tal van­i­ty” mea­sures, such as the num­ber of clicks and social engage­ments. Such num­bers con­tribute lit­tle to their under­stand­ing of CS. 

“Peo­ple can get stuck on these short-term met­rics, because things changed so dras­ti­cal­ly when Covid struck that they felt they had to make an imme­di­ate impact. But they can for­get the long-term require­ments when they do this. There has to be a bal­ance,” Miller warns.

He adds that NPS is an impor­tant indi­ca­tor – and it seems to be a key con­sid­er­a­tion for many oth­er senior mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Dan Rubel, brand and mar­ket­ing direc­tor at Cur­rys, reports that it’s his company’s most impor­tant mea­sure, indi­cat­ing whether the sum of its efforts has trans­lat­ed into cus­tomers who would rec­om­mend Cur­rys to friends and rel­a­tives. 

The com­pa­ny has received par­tic­u­lar­ly strong approval for its ShopLive ser­vice, for instance. Cur­rys start­ed enabling cus­tomers to con­sult tech­ni­cal experts using video calls when the UK’s Covid lock­downs oblig­ed them to shop online. This ser­vice has become a fix­ture, con­sis­tent­ly attract­ing pos­i­tive reviews. 

“The sin­gle biggest thing our brand lovers rave about is the humans who work so hard every day to help cus­tomers choose their tech,” Rubel says.

NPS, then, can take the intan­gi­ble and sub­jec­tive indi­vid­ual ele­ments of cus­tomer ser­vice and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and trans­late them into insights that become action­able and, cru­cial­ly, repeat­able. It sounds sim­ple enough in the­o­ry. 

“When you’re get­ting things right, you see that flow­ing into your com­mer­cial met­rics, oper­a­tional per­for­mance KPIs and cus­tomer per­cep­tion met­rics,” says Rubel, although he adds: “Achiev­ing that suc­cess is a far hard­er task.”

Dan Bow­ers, chief strat­e­gy offi­cer at cre­ative agency TMW Unlim­it­ed, is respon­si­ble for deliv­er­ing CS strate­gies through cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tions and more for com­pa­nies such as Voda­fone and McLaren. 

The key fac­tors in CS are “the ser­vice, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the prod­uct, how the cus­tomer engages with it and if it deliv­ers what they hope”, he says. “Find­ing a way of mea­sur­ing all that can be chal­leng­ing.”

The key point, Bow­ers notes, is to make a link between mar­ket­ing and busi­ness intel­li­gence with­out los­ing human deci­sion-mak­ing as a result. He warns specif­i­cal­ly against rely­ing too much on mea­sur­ing things just because you can, espe­cial­ly on the dig­i­tal side. 

“Did some­one go into an app? That gives you some lit­tle indi­ca­tions, but it doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly give you the inside sto­ry of what’s real­ly going on,” he says.

Data and busi­ness intel­li­gence lie at the heart of effec­tive CS. Rubel reveals that such insights are avail­able to employ­ees across the com­pa­ny, enabling them to adjust their approach accord­ing­ly. 

“Stores can see and analyse cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion them­selves, via a dig­i­tal plat­form, and col­leagues can look at the scores giv­en by the indi­vid­u­als they have served,” he says. 

The strate­gies that emerge from insights derived through CS mea­sure­ment need not be over­ly com­plex. For com­pa­nies such as Nuffield Health, Cur­rys and Weight­Watch­ers, it seems to be a mat­ter of fine-tun­ing proven for­mu­las to ensure that they can adapt to new trends and chal­lenges as they arise.

Miller observes that val­ue for mon­ey becomes ever more impor­tant to con­sumers when times are tough finan­cial­ly. As the UK econ­o­my fal­ters, Weight­Watch­ers “real­ly has to ensure” that its mem­bers can see evi­dence that its offer­ing is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more effec­tive than a DIY weight-loss pro­gramme.

Rubel con­cludes that, in essence, effec­tive CS is about help­ing the com­pa­ny make the right deci­sions for the cus­tomer, and itself, at the right times. 

“Big improve­ments in big busi­ness often rely on com­plex process trans­for­ma­tion or tricky tech changes,” he says. “Some of that can be expen­sive, so it’s impor­tant to choose where you’re focus­ing your ener­gies care­ful­ly, espe­cial­ly when cus­tomer expec­ta­tions are con­stant­ly on the rise.”