Meaningful Engagements: How to Achieve Your Customer’s Outcomes

This post was originally posted on The Success League.

“I can’t believe that customer is going to churn! Their usage looks great and we’ve met a few times recently. This was a complete surprise.” This conversation happens too often within many Customer Success (CS) organizations. The root cause of churn is typically a failure to understand and achieve your customer’s business outcomes. How do you overcome this and prevent the cycle of churn from reoccurring?

By business outcomes, I’m referring to the reasons why your customers have purchased your product or service in the first place and the reasons they continue to work with you. There should be quantifiable goals that you have jointly defined with your customer. A few examples can include increasing revenue, saving employee time, and improving the customer experience.

There are typically a few ways that CS teams are tracking business outcome achievement:

• The traditional account management method where you meet with your customers regularly and confirm with them directly.
• The hands-off method where you monitor usage data as a proxy for business outcome achievement.
• A combination of the two.

All too often there isn’t a systematic approach to tracking business outcome achievement, which results in surprise churn or something akin to it. A way to combat this is to create a coordinated engagement approach…