Which software company established the very first named Customer Success group? (Hint: It wasn’t Salesforce.) Teaser: No, it wasn’t a SaaS/Cloud vendor. But that beginning did share some common ground with all of the Customer Success teams that have followed it, and those yet to come into being. Senior Management recognized that retaining customers was vital to the future of the company, and that retention could not be taken for granted. The burden of being successful in using the product had to be shared between vendor and customer.
In 1996, a CRM company realized that, industry-wide, enterprise CRM systems had an unfortunately high failure rate. While the bulk of the vendor’s profits from the sale of the perpetual licenses was taken at the signing of the contract, failed implementations not only endangered future sales, they also resulted in strategically significant losses in expected support and maintenance fees. For this company, whose goal was to have 100% of their customers be willing to serve as references at any time, and whose sales teams regularly tossed the entire customer list on the table in front of qualified prospects, inviting them to call anyone they wished — there could be no such thing as a failed implementation or a dissatisfied customer. The real driver, however, was to grow the relationship and revenues post-sale. The traditional organizational structure wasn’t enough, a new approach was needed.
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