I love the concept of customer success. I've argued in recent blogs that it is going to be a necessary concept for organizations to embrace in the coming era of service and support. A recent interview conducted with Egnyte shows the incredible value of a well run success program.

As a customer, my experience with customer success seems to indicate that organizations are willing to embrace the term customer success without putting in the necessary rigor to ensure actual success. Seems like more of a me-too approach to the concept.

In the past 6 months, I've encountered customer success teams on 3 separate occasions. The first was in canceling a service where the success agent was very good. Yet, it was too late for customer success to be introduced as the decision had already been made. In addition, I have to believe that customer success isn't just another term for churn avoidance. On the other two occasions, I was introduced to customer success at the point of purchase of business solutions. I was excited to test out the concept but very disappointed with the success experience. The introductory calls were very cookie cutter. Templatized answers with the standard "please visit our self-service portal if you have any questions". But what has me even more confused or disappointed is that I haven't heard from customer success since. Isn't consistent and constant communication a core feature of customer success programs? A simple check in would suffice. Perhaps I'm not spending enough to warrant the right level of customer success. Then, why introduce me to the concept in the first place. It almost makes it worse.

I'm confused enough that I've decided to study the topic of customer success - its applicability to all kinds of businesses; best practices; and more. If you're in customer success and you think that I have it wrong, or that my sample size above is too limited, then take a few moments to participate in this research survey. If you're not in customer success but would like to share your thoughts on putting a program together, please take part as well. I'll make sure you get the summary results when I hit 75-100 total responses.

If you don't want to take the survey, fair enough. I'd like to hear what you think of customer success and who does it right.