How to build a customer success organization
Even Skyscrapers Start on the Ground…
If your customer success organization is nonexistent or in the nascent phases, you’re at the right place. TSIA can help you:
Establish your customer success organization.
Validate every move you make.
Hire the right talent.
Fund customer success.
Getting Started With Customer Success
As a technology provider, you are making a promise to your customers that your products and services will help them achieve their desired outcomes. And that’s why customer success is indispensable.
Customer success is the function within your organization responsible for customer outcome delivery by driving adoption, expansion, and renewal.
Establishing your customer success organization with a strong, well-thought-out foundation is key.
For over a decade, TSIA has been analyzing, studying, and helping customer success member companies build and scale their customer success functions.
Three Crucial Steps to Establishing a Customer Success Organization
Align your organization around a charter.
TSIA research has shown three primary charters of customer success: adoption, retention, and expansion. There is often overlap among these charters.
Fund customer success.
Many organizations struggle to fund customer success because they lack a clear model for how to budget and scale. With the right budgeting principles, you can create a bulletproof argument for funding your organization.
Hire the right profiles and compensate accordingly.
When hiring customer success managers (CSMs), look for the essential skills they will need to be effective. Compensation strategies must align with your organizational charter.
As your organization matures, you will also need to:
- Invest in analytics.
- Assess customer adoption.
- Develop capabilities for growth.
- Measure your progress with the right KPIs.
- Monetize customer success.
- Invest in digital for scale and management.
Learn More
Best Practices for Establishing a Customer Success Organization
Fueled by Data
At TSIA, we have the largest vault of customer success tech industry data in the world, with studies on companies from the Fortune 100 to tech SMBs.
TSIA’s Customer Success research practice is focused on helping our members increase user adoption and grow customers by bridging the gap between the promise of technology and customer outcomes.
For over a decade, our industry experts have worked directly with customer success teams, providing advisory and benchmarking, so our members can effectively optimize, scale, and grow
Trusted by Customer Success Executives from:
Get Tangible Outcomes
With our customer success research, benchmarking, and advisory, we’ve helped our Customer Success members achieve an average 11% increase in renewal rate and 5% decrease in discount rate.
| We Have the ROI: Economic Impact of Membership Customer Success |
|||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Services Revenues | %Impact | $1M | $5M | $10M | $25M | $50M | $100M | $250M | $500M |
| Renewal Rate | 11% | $110,000 | $550,000 | $1.1M | $2.75M | $5.5M | $11M | $27.5M | $55M |
| Contract Discount Rate | 5% | $50,000 | $250,000 | $500,000 | $1.25M | $2.5M | $5M | $1.5M | $25M |
We value TSIA greatly. Our membership provides a wealth of knowledge and data that grounds us in fundamentals that drive our success.
Gregory Park
VP, Customer Success,
Quadient
Without TSIA, I wouldn’t be able to really understand how to grow and mature our processes. We were able to understand where we are starting from with our benchmark, go through the workshop, and be able to build upon that. Having a roadmap to success is super important for us.
Justin Chappell
Director, Customer Experience,
Hyland Software
As a relatively new CSM organization at Medallia, the insight that TSIA provided was invaluable and will help us make the case for a best-in-class CSM organization aligned to industry best-practices. They went above and beyond to give us all the resources we needed to meet a tight deadline for an executive presentation. We look forward to our continued partnership!
Kim Palenik
Senior CX Principal, Customer Success,
Medallia
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