Customer Success Is Not About Making Your Startup’s Customers Happy
Don’t let your customer success strategy mask the flaws in your product
Last week, a startup leader who I sometimes advise came to me with a problem he was having with his customer success team. In a nutshell, the problem was low morale and even lower productivity — and as a result, fewer successful customers.
When I asked him what his customer success team did, he told me: “Whatever it takes to make the customers happy.”
I admire his altruism, but that’s not how customer success works.
It’s not 100 percent his fault. Product management language is, like most business jargon, full of terms that have a little inside-joke feel to them. I mean, it’s “customer” and “success” — how can it not be about making the customer happy?
Feels like a gotcha.
But the problem wasn’t with the term so much as it was that “customer success” was being used to cover up flaws in the product. Ironically, these were flaws that should have been resolved by a proper customer success approach. So we dug into what customer success should and shouldn’t be.
