Part 1. History of Customer Success in Europe: The Beginnings (2011 to 2016)
This is the first of three articles that cover the evolution of customer success in the European market, looking at how it has grown and changed over the past decade. Unlike the US origins story, customer success in Europe emerged later, in line with cloud adoption, and was shaped by the expansion of key American tech companies into the European landscape. By focusing on Europe, we can better understand the distinct trajectory of customer success and how external environments influenced its development.
Introduction
The history of customer success has largely focused on its origins and evolution in the United States. Beginning with the creation of the first customer success function in 1995, and further development at companies like Salesforce in the early 2000s, the story told has centred on American tech companies. However, customer success has an important history in Europe as well. While adopting some practices from the US, customer success in Europe has followed its own path, driven by unique factors like the broader acceptance of cloud-based technologies across enterprises.
2011/12 - Adoption-Focused Customer Success
The first modern customer success teams in Europe emerged out of tech hubs in Amsterdam, London, and Dublin around 2011-2012. Companies with US-headquarters, like Yammer, Box, Salesforce and UK-based Huddle were some of the first to hire customer success managers (CSMs) to support their rapidly growing European customer bases.
These early CSMs worked mainly with disruptive enterprise early adopters who were implementing innovative cloud-based solutions like Yammer, Box and Salesforce. Much of this technology had started as bottom-up, shadow IT - organically adopted by business units rather than enterprise IT teams.
The viral, bottom-up adoption of tools like Yammer and Box marked a shift to more business-led, rather than IT-led, technology purchasing. The early CSMs enabled this transformation, working closely with business stakeholders to drive adoption and prove the value of the new SaaS solutions. Their success in landing and expanding these pioneering SaaS apps paved the way for massive cloud growth across Europe in the decade to follow.
2013/14 - The Usage Wars
Tech companies started to take the learnings from bottom-up growth and brought an element of fear into IT teams. Sellers impressed upon IT teams that they had to get control of these new cloud applications before the applications took hold organically across the business. This was accomplished by working with business leaders to drive company-wide adoption and change how applications were provisioned top-down rather than bottom-up.
We started to see company-wide licenses being sold, and CSMs were tasked with ensuring the usage of these licenses. Utilisation became the key metric - getting the percentage of licenses sold to be actively used.
To drive utilisation, Sales teams began to receive commission accelerators for meeting certain consumption levels. This brought Sales and Customer Success together, as the post-sales Customer Success team was needed to help transition "traditional sellers" to become more solution-focused. Sales reps started working more closely with Customer Success and staying connected with the customer for longer after the initial sale to drive ongoing consumption.
Example of business-led use case adoption. Source: Kate Forgione, Yammer 2013
2015/16 - Enterprise Cloud Transformation
By 2015, cloud adoption was accelerating across Europe as large enterprises raced for a competitive advantage with the cloud. Digital transformation was at the heart of these strategic investments - and we started to see top-down, company-wide rollouts of cloud applications like Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Workday. IT teams started to adopt Azure and AWS to host core data apps.
The focus shifted from getting a few teams using the technology, to enabling usage across the entire organization. Customer Success teams expanded rapidly during this period to support large complex deployments. Customer Success managers needed more complex skills, including change and stakeholder management.
In 2015, the first Customer Success conference, Customer SuccessCo was held in London, hosted by Mikael Blaisdell of the Customer Success Association.
In 2016 Slack arrived in London, and their first CSMs were hired. Slack pursued an aggressive “no sales” growth model, relying on no-cost, low-cost entry across SMBs and then targeted the enterprise's early adopters with CSM interventions. Slack introduced one of the first usage-only contract terms.
The agenda from the first customer success conference in Europe, SuccessCon London 2016. Source: Customer Success Association
Next: The Customer Success Boom: 2017-2019
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