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Customer Success Strategy

A customer-first approach for succeeding in the XaaS world

A holistic customer success (CS) strategy enables organizations to shift to a customer-centric mindset, resulting in satisfied customers who drive long-term growth and profitability. Making that shift is often challenging and should require a strategic vision that breaks down silos and creates alignment across the entire organization.

What is customer success?

CS is an organizational mindset that drives proactive orchestration of capabilities to deliver a distinctive customer experience. With this mindset, organizations can understand customers at a deeper level than ever before, properly diagnose their most troubling pain points, and maximize value creation through providing the right products and services. By enabling their biggest business goals to be realized, organizations can transform customers into long-term advocates. Put simply, an effective customer success strategy helps lead to happier customers.

Why CS, and why now?

As customers today engage more and more with digital solutions fueled by the cloud and sold in flexible consumption models, a customer success strategy is more critical than ever. End users rely on real-time data access and remote delivery capabilities packaged in outcome-based services. This evolution from a traditional linear customer engagement model to a more dynamic, cyclical anything-as-a-service (XaaS) model has reframed the old question, “Who can I sell my product to?” It’s now a more customer-centric ask: “What does my customer need?”

What are the benefits?

Enabling the capture of added business value while providing enhanced experiences results in tangible benefits for both customers and organizations. Embracing a CS model and mindset means shifting the focus of the provider’s business to be more customer-centric, resulting in higher wallet share, lower cost-to-serve, and increased customer loyalty. The best solutions focus on swift and painless customer onboarding along with proactive retention and growth planning efforts to deliver higher value to customers. Deloitte has worked with leading organizations to build a CS vision and execute on that strategy to deliver positive and prolonged impact.

IT technology

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How can Deloitte help?

Deloitte’s approach is focused on helping clients think through the model and vision, capabilities, metrics, customer insights, and tools required to design and operate a successful customer success strategy. We have a robust set of IP, tools, and accelerators that make up our top-to-bottom offerings, including capability maps, transformation frameworks, key CS metrics, and customer health scorecards. We first look to understand the unique challenges that exist within our client’s environment, then tap into our mindshare across subject matter experts to create and deliver a customized approach for that organization.

What challenges exist?

By designing, incubating, and launching a best-in-class CS model, Deloitte can help to address a wide range of challenges that organizations frequently deal with. We’ll work with you to answer and address these critical questions:

Are your business’ CS skills being siloed by a focus on individual products instead of a multi-product offerings adoption?

Are there misaligned incentives between sales, support, and CS teams?

Is your ability to clearly articulate business value hampered by evolving business models and increasing complexity in service portfolios?

Is there late engagement of CS teams in the sales process, leading to sub-optimal deployments, lack of offering adoption, and attrition?

Does your enterprise have outdated data architectures and tools for customer health visualization, analytics, and workflow management?

Is there a lack of alignment on a common definition of customer health metrics, and limited focus to track and monitor customer data?

Can your business and its leaders embrace the importance of CS across the enterprise, which requires a concerted shift in company culture?

Is there confusion around the relationship between customer success, customer support, and customer experience strategy?

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The final word: a holistic perspective

Hiring is booming for customer-success-focused roles, with more and more companies adding chief customer officers and customer experience professionals to their C-suites. Deloitte approaches this growing field and required shift in cultural mindset head-on with a vertically integrated perspective that adjusts for considerations at the strategic and working levels of the organization. Our holistic approach starts with the desired outcomes in mind and incorporates planning and monitoring tools into the fabric of your business to help you develop and maintain a customer success strategy that becomes a foundation across the entire organization.