The Top 9 Customer Success Trends Going Into 2020

When it comes to customer success, every year brings with it a new set of trends. Some of these may be fleeting fashions, but more commonly, they reflect bigger trends in tech advancements and data-based business processes, as well as attitudinal changes between customers and businesses. 

So as we come to the end of 2019, let’s look back at some of the trends we’ve seen over the last few months, as well as what we can expect as we draw closer to the new year. 

Trend #1: Greater Focus on Revenue Generation Than Churn Reduction

For a while, customer success has focused on reducing churn – keeping customers loyal and avoiding the loss of revenue that comes when a customer shops elsewhere. 

However, more recently, this focus has shifted towards using customer success to actually drive revenue. Not only does this help scale businesses, but it also has the useful side effect of reducing revenue churn as a byproduct.  

Adopting this new focus requires a mindset shift. Rather than worrying about churn to the exclusion of all other metrics, focus efforts across your whole organization onto facilitating customer success.

Do this by:

• Investing in your understanding of what customer success looks like to you and your business. 
• Developing your understanding of your product and how your customers engage with it.
• Knowing exactly how your customer satisfaction correlates with revenue growth (so that you can gauge when and where to apply spend most effectively).
• Implementing customer success best practices throughout your organization. 

Trend #2: Greater Emphasis on Data-Driven Decision-Making

This decade has seen an explosion in data-driven business. From machine learning to AI, the way we capture and use data is affecting all areas of the sales cycle, including customer success. 

First, this means using data to gain a real-time understanding of customer metrics, such as MRR, ARR and retention. In this way, customer success teams can learn when and how to connect with their customers in the most proactive and helpful way. 

Essentially, the shift in emphasis to data-driven insights means that customer success teams can make better decisions all around, delivering timely service and helping customers to avoid eleventh-hour surprises. 

However, data also helps customer success teams demonstrate ROI. Real-time data proves the health of customers, shows their progression along the customer journey, and supports the quick identification of problems that could otherwise affect profitability.  

Trend #3: Greater Investment in Customer Journey Mapping

As technology has improved and data-based insights become more readily available, customer success teams are better able to measure and map the customer’s journey during and after the buying process in order to deliver optimal messaging and support at each touchpoint. 

Personalized customer experiences not only make for a more likely purchase, but also support higher bottom-line revenue. 

Customer journey mapping is far from new, and has been a part of customer experience delivery since the 1960s. However, the journey maps of the past have tended to be linear in shape, often describing the customer’s route through a business in terms of a funnel-like shape. 

Of course, customer decision-making processes are rarely linear. That’s why today’s companies are placing more importance on the cycle model of journey mapping, which demonstrates that a healthy customer-business relationship doesn’t begin and end, but instead continues throughout cycles of loyalty and trust. 

If your company intends to carry out a customer journey mapping exercise, keep in mind that it’s an ongoing process – not a one-time task that can be completed and put to the side. It takes continual effort to tweak and adjust your model as you learn more about your customers, or as your company and products change over time. 

Solid customer journey maps should include several components. First, they must be based on well-researched customer profiles. Through data-based insight into your customers, you’ll be able to identify needs and goals, purchasing behaviors and other considerations that may affect how your map looks. 

Next, journey maps need to include each and every touchpoint – both online and offline, and across all platforms and media where your customers engage with your brand. Listing these out helps to visualize the full picture of your customer experience, as well as to identify any gaps in messaging that prevent your customers from achieving a seamless experience with your brand. 

Finally, your map needs to capture the entirety of your customer’s journey. That is, your engagement doesn’t start when prospects first find your brand and then end when they click “purchase” on your checkout. Rather, the journey begins at the first point of research and continues all the way through to onboarding, activation, referrals, upsells and repeat purchases. 

Trend #4: The Development and Implementation of Customer Health Score Metrics

Up-to-date, even real-time data on your customers is a critical part of achieving true customer success. And thanks to the leaps and bounds made recently in available software, companies are better able to develop and implement customer health score metrics than ever before. 

Knowing these health score metrics is the key to everything from knowing when to upsell or cross-sell to customers whose data indicate that they’re ready to make additional purchases, to investing more in nurturing those who are signaling that they’re about to leave you. 

Implementing customer health scores requires a robust process that defines what “customer health” actually looks like for your company. 

• Is your health score a predictor of churn, renewal or some other metric? 
• Can it fluctuate, and if so, how quickly and to what degree?
• Which elements make up your overall health score? 
• Are elements equally important, and are they subjective or objective?

Next, you need to know which inputs to measure. A few common options include:

• How often customers contacted support
• Account growth by way of revenue or percentage of time
• Overall product usage
• Length of time as a customer
• Customer lifetime value
• Invoice history
• Overall relationship

As you go through this process, you’ll likely realize that, for every five customer health goals you identify, you’ll quickly think of ten more. The same goes for customer health inputs. But the point here is that defining and measuring your customer health metrics should be an iterative and dynamic process. Expect that it’s going to change as your business priorities develop, and as you learn more about your target customers.  

Trend #5: Predictive Analytics Becomes More Proactive and Less Reactive

Over the last decade or so, the growth of machine learning has brought with it a growing emphasis on predictive analytics, which helps teams predict customer outcomes and provide the best possible support and communication throughout the customer journey. In fact, predictive analytics can help businesses identify potential churn and iron out difficulties before they create problems. 

Understandably, predictive analytics are beginning to overtake the more traditional rule-based alerts that are common to SaaS solutions. That’s a good thing, since these, “if this, then that” models are often based on nothing more than the SaaS vendor’s intuition. 

Now, using predictive analytics, hundreds and thousands of factors can be analyzed in a split second, giving customer success teams a deeper understanding of how different behaviors affect outcomes. Effectively, it’s real science, replacing human intuition. 

This level of predictive analysis can help customer success teams to provide more proactive models of service. Not only are they more accurate – and get increasingly more accurate over time, as more data is captured – but they also adapt their outcomes to changes in customers’ behaviors. 

The result? More time is freed up for the high-touch customer success activities that can lead to increased revenue.

Trend #6: The Use of Technology to Scale Customer Success Efforts

Scaling customer success efforts is something I’ve been seeing more and more businesses focus on this year. 

Some of the most notable customer success tech products that aim to support these initiatives include Gainsight, UserIQ and Totango. But when choosing your platform, there are several questions you’ll want to ask. What do you need your tech to do? Do you have the necessary skills or experience in-house to operate your chosen tool? Is the tool appropriate for your particular industry or business model? For example, if you are in the healthcare industry, you might try out this practice management software. Can you track your desired customer success metrics using the particular tool? 

Beyond technology, businesses are beginning to invest more in operations roles to manage customer success technology on a programmatic level. The ROI of both the tech and the operations personnel proves itself worthwhile, given the increased productivity and reduction in customer loss they support. 

Trend #7: The Adoption of Customer Success Principles Organization-Wide (and in Departments Outside of Strict CS)

As recently as 2017, customer success began to lose its reputation as a siloed and isolated department, turning instead towards a pan-company discipline. 

In the past, a new customer might be passed down a line of customer service, sales and success reps, each of whom dealt with a particular stage of the buyer journey. However, companies have increasingly realized the benefit of having a customer focus at every point of the process. 

Whether on the product development team, the finance office or the marketing department, letting the customer drive strategy is now understood to create a more seamless and satisfactory experience.

Trend #8: More Training Courses and More Willingness to Invest in Them)

Given how quickly customer success is evolving, it’s understandable that businesses are prioritizing educational programs over hiring new staff to keep up. Local and national industry events, such as the Customer Success Summit, are an option for some companies, as are educational courses with dedicated programs on customer success. 

SuccessHACKER is one such website that allows subscribers to log in and access customer SuccessTRAINING modules. Meanwhile, The Success League offers a more formal CSM education, delivered through hour-long classes scheduled across a four-month period.

Trend #9: Customer Success Beyond SaaS and Software

Finally, customer success is starting to infiltrate companies outside of the typical SaaS and software verticals. In some ways, it’s surprising to see industries that haven’t always been early technology adopters get on board with tech-intensive customer success practices. 

However, given the tremendous value that comes from capturing customer lifecycle data in order to influence customer engagements, it’s clear why even the most tech-averse companies would want to overcome their reticence and get on board the customer success train.

Having said all that, have you noticed any of these customer success trends in practice over the past year? Are there other trends you’re keeping an eye on? Share your thoughts and experiences by leaving me a comment below:

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