Every time you turn around, it looks like someone is taking a shot at customer success (CS). Whether at last year’s SaaStr or elsewhere, more voices have been calling for new approaches to CS — ones that transform CS from cost center to tool for growth.

While it’s still early to plan a funeral, CS leaders who are feeling the pressure should examine their objectives and strategies more closely. Whether you are service-based or product-driven — or following a more traditional business model — certain “truths” about customers remain constant. Specifically, you can’t grow what you can’t retain, and it costs less to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Enhancing retention should be a top priority on every B2B firm’s 2025 goal list.

Prove Value So That Growth Becomes Inevitable

Whether or not you have a distinct function called customer success, some part of your company must be responsible for ensuring that what customers signed up to get is going to give them value for their business so that they then will continue to pay you for that value and more.

The problem today is less with the “what” and more about the “how.” Common questions we hear today are “How do we scale CS efficiently?” “How should we measure CS’s impact on the business?” and “How do we justify further investment?”

As companies grow and mature, their approach to customer retention requires interactions that decision-makers and users alike find valuable. Answering these questions and ensuring that you can demonstrate that these interactions provide value requires a solid strategy, the resources and skills to execute it, and the ability to account for your results.

Is My Strategy Setting My Customers Up To Succeed?

Of course, the answer to questions about strategy will depend on where you are and how you are doing. At Forrester, we believe that a successful CS strategy has six main components:

  1. Purpose or charter. Is CS’s role to manage the account, resolve issues, and advocate internally? Or are you helping customers achieve their goals through a differentiated customer experience that drives retention, growth, and advocacy?
  2. Alignment. To what degree does CS work in a highly collaborative manner — and share metrics — with all customer-facing teams to help ensure that customers achieve their goals?
  3. Performance metrics. How does CS show that it improves customers’ business outcomes — through periodic reviews and success plans or by continuously reporting on and managing results through a digital experience personalized to each account?
  4. Technology and data. Do your data and technology practices increase CS productivity and enhance insights? Or are you also creating a distinctive digital experience that supports a seamless journey and enhances their realized value?
  5. Customer lifecycle management. Do you actively work to define your customers’ journeys and ensure that they reflect the key milestones they must achieve to adopt your offering successfully and shorten time to value? Is the ultimate stage of that journey an activated advocate who differentiates your brand?
  6. Budget and capacity. To what extent is CS run as a self-funded P&L? Does it use a tiered coverage model with pricing that ranges from free to customer-funded? Is the business case for budgets based on a multiyear cost-benefit analysis that includes provisions for risk and future expansion/flexibility?

How Mature Is Your Approach To CS?

To explore these strategic questions further, we invite you to take the Forrester Customer Success Strategy Assessment, available to everyone through this survey link. After the survey, you will receive an overall score and scores for each of the six components.

For those planning to attend Forrester’s B2B Summit North America in Phoenix, Arizona, at the end of March, Shari Srebnick and I will be hosting a workshop where attendees can:

  • Assess customer success strategy and identify capability or maturity gaps.
  • Compare results with peers and collaborate on possible solutions or next actions.
  • Outline an action plan to update the CS strategy after the conference.

The workshop will be held on Monday, March 31, at 3:30 p.m. Pre-registration is required and space is limited, so don’t delay! Hope to see you there.