Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

This book is fantastic and really helped me see the bigger picture when it comes to the subscription-based economic revolution that we are a part of. It is a trend that had started a few years prior and will only continue to grow. People these days prefer to 'rent' their services versus own outright and it is incumbent on organizations to deliver a high quality customer experience to encourage their clients to keep utilizing them. Customers demand this type of treatment and will go elsewhere if they do not receive it. More than anything, I learned that the Customer Success arm of your organization cannot move mountains alone; this function needs to be front and center, supported from the top down and regarded as a key element to overall success. It must be resourced and supported just as any other revenue creation team must be.I close this review with some advice once given to me by my grandfather that still, and will always, hold true: 'Always give more of yourself than people expect'

In a nutshell, this book is based on the following premise: The ultimate goal of Customer Success is driving high lifetime value (LTV) via retention with upsell which is earned by proactively accelerating customers’ time-to-value in a way that creates attitudinal (emotional) loyalty.The book does a good job of covering the WHY and the WHAT of customer success. Specifically, there is good coverage of: key metrics, risks to detect, and key activities (at a high level). As other reviewers have commented, you will be disappointed if you are looking for a how-to guide with in-depth case studies.If I can offer one criticism, it is that the content jumps back and forth and is frequently overlapping. The main cause for this is that the bulk of the book is actually a reprint of a GainSight content marketing piece entitled "10 Laws of Customer Success" that is itself a compendium of the views of 10 different authors.

Customer Success has become the industry buzzword du jour. In many cases, large corporations are simply renaming their Account Management function; in other cases companies are hiring a Customer Success Manager and assuming "job done."In reality, customer success is an evolving discipline and no one has all the answers - and even if they did, things are changing so rapidly that today's best practice may become tomorrow's failure. This book is a good introduction to many of the core concepts of customer success, and why understanding what success means for your customer is essential to remaining competitive in today's subscription economy.The book has a few major gaps. First of all, segmentation is purely on size of customer organization / size of revenue from first sale; it doesn't address the fact that you might be serving multiple quite different customer types all of whom are in the "long tail." Additionally the book doesn't recognize that there might be several different actors in the play. Success for the call center manager might be "getting this new product installed and running within 90 days" whereas success for the call center director might be "reducing staffing costs by 5% while improving time-to-answer by 10%." You have to know your customers at a reasonable level of detail in order to know what metrics matter to which of them, and why.But these points aside, the book does a good job of introducing the concepts of measuring success by definable metrics, keeping constant watch on those metrics, and ensuring that every part of the organization understands that making things as easy as possible for the customer is key to survival in today's world. Even organizations operating in apparent backwaters such as the manufacturing of heavy industrial equipment should study the lessons in this book in order to see (a) how to beat the competition by being more customer-outcome focused, and (b) how to increase revenue opportunities by understanding the entire customer life cycle. Today pre-sales and after-sales are generally quite different animals with different incentives and the customer is the one who experiences the gaps; tomorrow there should be a continuous coherent journey from initial discovery through to expansion and renewal - but this can't happen unless the entire organization understands what parts play which roles in customer success and incentives are correctly aligned.If you expect this to be a "how to do customer success" playbook you will be disappointed. There's a significant number of key omissions and some hand-waving, plus the usual business-book generalities. But if you use it to stimulate your own thinking about how your company can focus more on making sure your customers come back for more, it's a valuable tool. Just realize that we're in the early days of customer success thinking, so your journey will likely be on or near the bleeding edge - just like everyone else.

Whether you’re in a subscription-based product model or not, this book will help you. I would say it’s a very high-level overview of customer success. The info was extremely useful if you’re a CS rookie, or an exec looking to broaden your horizons.

I rarely write reviews, but was compelled to do so for this comprehensive book on the newest function emerging in the software industry, Customer Success. As an Exec relatively new to the field, but well experienced in sales and account management, I find myself coming back to this book over and over for guidance and inspiration. It is clear, straight forward and full of practical, applicable information that can be utilized by any sales organization. It is a great read for anyone new to Customer Success or for CXO/VP levels as they move to the subscription economy.

I could not put this book down -- it is clearly written and flows really smoothly. It's a great source book to refer back to. I am using a lot of the principles to start a new software company. It prepared me well for customer discovery interviews. Highly recommend!

Basics of customer service with some new jargon. Although there were some decently described program designs to help you creatively make your own.

Those of you who want to learn and grow in the field of Customer Success or want to become an expert should read this book. Customer Success is a great complement to other great works like those that come from Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA).