Here at inSided we’re inspired by the Customer Success movement that’s taking the B2B SaaS world by storm. Many of our newest customers are operating in the B2B SaaS space themselves and have embraced community engagement as central to their efforts to scale Customer Success.  

But is Customer Success only relevant for B2B SaaS companies? In essence, Customer Success was born from the growth of subscription-based business models where growth means not just adding new customers, but keeping existing ones. Customer Success teams drive retention by engaging in a proactive and personalized way to ensure that their customers are successful in achieving their goals and get value from what they’ve purchased.  

So it boils down to being focused on the customer. Sound familiar? We’ve all experienced the rise of Customer Experience as a discipline and philosophy in recent years. CX has driven an evolution in many organizations with a mindset shift from being reactive and cost-focused towards improving the experience by removing obstacles and effort across the entire customer journey. CX teams tend to prioritize NPS as a metric as it speaks directly to advocacy and indirectly to loyalty and retention.

One way to look at these two movements, then, is that CX is for B2C what Customer Success is for B2B SaaS. We think there might be a different way to think about this, however.

There’s something new that the philosophy of Customer Success is adding to customer engagement that we believe all organizations can learn and benefit from. In the same way that CX taught Customer Support teams that it’s vital to look at the end-to-end experience of the customer, we are finding that Customer Success is demonstrating the value of ongoing engagement with customers, measured directly through retention.

We’d love to know your thoughts. Do you also recognize this shift? Is retention also becoming a more important metric in your organization? What does proactive and personalized mean to you?