Part 2. History of Customer Success in Europe: The Crafting of a Profession (2017 to 2019)

This is the second article in our series about the history of customer success in Europe. This time we look at the changes year-by-year as customer success took hold in Europe and started to accelerate its growth.

2017 Operational Success

Customer success started to gain momentum in Europe, with Gainsight setting up their first European office in London. Gainsight influenced the shift of customer success from adoption to more operational elements. Managing churn was central to the pain strategy, and with the first round of renewals on the horizon for many CSMs, the timing couldn’t have been better. Customer Success leaders in Europe turned their attention to customer health, churn prediction, segmentation, tiering, touch and volume management of customers at scale.

With the emergence of customer success management platforms, leaders started to want and need more autonomy in spending budgets at their companies. Alongside the purchase of these platforms, was a new focus on Customer Success Operations. It became clear the customer success leaders needed specialists to focus on the quality inputs and management of the output of their customer success platform. The effort required was beyond the “extra responsibilities” neither they nor their teams could take on. The changes in budget allocation and the specialisation of roles fueled the debate about, “Who should customer success report to?”

2017 was also memorable for the first European hosted and run conference in Dublin by Customer Success Europe. Customer Success Network, a peer learning community for customer success managers, was also founded in the same year*.

2018 Competency, Capability and Careers

Unsurprisingly with the changes in the organisational design (reporting lines, roles and team sizes) competency frameworks and career pathways became important for customer success leaders in 2018. Teams had started to become larger, with layers of team leads, types of customers and experiences meaning that managers started to seek ways to manage retention and build the capabilities of their teams.

Competency matrices were widely shared between leaders, change management skills were valued and we started to see specialist career pathways emerge for CSMs. Companies like Box and Adobe established career plans for CSMs governed by a competency framework. We started to see the emergence of Customer Success Enablement roles to train teams.

As a profession we had gone fast and deep into “Operational Success” and along the way many had reduced their attention to the people elements - both for their teams and customers. 2018 was very much a rebalancing between systems, results and people.

Source: 2018 CSN Workplace. Republished with the permission of Customer Success Network and Violaine Yziquel

2019 Value and Outcomes Success

As teams started to grow and customer success leaders needed to prepare more rigorous business cases for hiring, there was a shift as teams had to demonstrate their value beyond driving adoption and usage. The concepts of customer ROI (return on investment), business value and business value use cases had been around since 2012 but it was really after the release of Paul Henderson’s The Outcomes Generation in late 2018, that the engagement, processes and measurement of customer success took a step-change leap. Outcomes definitively stated, “You invest in our product to achieve a financial outcome X at your company.” If customers could tangibly measure the gains from their investment in your solution, they would continue to invest.

Internally customer success teams became more focused on business performance metrics, such as churn reduction, upsell, customer lifetime value and customer satisfaction. With the increased measurement and volume of quality data, leaders started to understand the correlation between activities with customers that simultaneously drove good outcomes for the customer and company. It meant effort could be more effectively prioritised.

2019 was an inflection point in Europe, as we saw Customer Success, develop muscle in measuring financial value achieved both by customers and internal contribution to the business.

*Customer Success Europe and Customer Success Network merged in 2018.

Next: Part 3. History of Customer Success: A Boom (2020 to 2023)

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