Why did I write the book “Helping Customers Win?”  While there are other books on customer success, this book builds on industry-standard customer management frameworks, to focus on customer-facing team’s soft skills, desired service, and business development mindsets, and regular operational considerations to be effective and efficient in these roles. This book is for the savvy business-minded reader who is looking for a real-world solution handbook to use as a practical reference guide throughout their professional career.

I wrote this book for people who work in the information technology industry and who serve customers of software, hardware, and related services. However, many of the ideas and suggestions in this book are equally applicable to customer success managers in other industries and sectors who cater to business customers. Whether you work in information technology or another industry, this book provides valuable insights for anyone dedicated to their customers’ success.

Individuals entering the corporate world or looking to navigate up the corporate ladder will find this book useful. Technical resources, transitioning into customer-facing roles, experience the importance of soft skills that were never emphasized in previous positions. Experienced coworkers typically provide on-the-job guidance and the most important lessons to newcomers to be effective in these roles. While technical skills, training, and information can be transferred in much less time, soft skills and corporate etiquette takes significant time, since most lessons are learned when related circumstances occur in the workplace. People learn them through hits, misses, sheer embarrassment, and sometimes forced exits over multiple years of their careers. This book lists the skills required to be successful in this role along with numerous examples and suggestions to have a healthy conversation and relationships with customers. It also includes numerous tools, procedures, templates, analysis, and software suggestions to improve customer retention rates.

This book will also benefit management consultants serving the large services sector worldwide. Practicing customer success managers will get an independent perspective to validate or fine-tune their approaches. I include suggestions for supervisors leading customer success organizations to help coach and monitor their customer success managers effectively. This book is also a good general reference on corporate etiquette, which is very important for success in the corporate world. Human resource managers are advised to maintain a copy of this book in their library for newcomers, after validation with the senior staff at their respective organizations.

Readers from startups in Silicon Valley and other centers of innovation worldwide, where the focus is predominantly on innovation and customer acquisition, and less on customer success post-deployment, will find value in this authoritative guide. The education imparted herewith will help the reader manage the customer relationship through product sale, implementation, deployment, ongoing renewals, upsell, and cross-sell opportunities.

The information outlined in this book will help the reader build appealing success stories that will not only help with retention of existing customers but also promote these success stories with prospects. Both marketing and sales departments will benefit from the development of customer success case studies, white papers, e-books, infographics, and blog collateral originating from successful customer engagements.

I have used industry terms common in corporate literature. For instance, the term vendor refers to the seller of the product and the employer of the resources serving the customer. References to other terms are also established throughout the book and can be collectively found in the “Glossary” as well.

This book is divided into three parts:

Part I, Customer Success Concepts, introduces the customer success concepts, explains the importance of customer success roles at organizations, and outlines frameworks, metrics, and tools required to set up and monitor progress. It lays the foundation to establish a solid customer success department in your organization and to appreciate Parts II, Circular Customer Touchpoint Phases, and III, Customer Success Team and Operational Considerations, that dive deeper into the numerous lessons I learned while interacting with customers over my multi-decade customer success career.

Part II, Circular Customer Touchpoint Phases, segments touchpoints or interactions with customers in iterative phases: business development and sales, implementation, rollout, adoption, and review. In the sales phase, every customer starts as a prospect whose information and requirements are collected by a company’s marketing effort. Subsequently, sales teams get involved to convince the prospect to try to buy the vendor’s products and services. In the implementation phase, the vendor’s implementation team works with customer contacts to give shape to the expectations collected in the sales phase. In the rollout phase—the vendor team in collaboration with the customer-assigned champion team—rolls out the software to end-users who are provided access to the implemented solution. In the adoption phase, vendor and customer teams continuously check back with the end-users to make sure they can make use of the software as intended. In the review and audit phase, vendors and customers independently review the progress and achievement of desired milestones. These five phases are iterative since after the review phase and even through the earlier phases, vendors automatically attempt to enlarge the scope of the sold products and services by urging the customer to buy more and sign up for other projects, which follow the same five-phase approach to realize the proposed value for the customer.

Part III, Customer Success Team and Operational Considerations, covers the softer side of this book. It dives into the key components of a customer success professional’s personality, and operational considerations, namely, customer meeting protocols, team setup, management supervision, and operational templates that success professionals can start with or reference for guidance.

Readers can read the book in multiple ways. They can start with the beginning and back sections to get the high-level structure, read the book backward a few pages, skim the beginning and end sections of each chapter, skim the contents focusing on the call outs, and finally deep dive into relevant stories and experiences based on the emerging interest. Newcomers to the customer success role, or college recruits entering the corporate sector, can read this book start to finish. Existing practitioners can look up chapters or indexes for specific topics or subtopics. Human resource and senior leadership looking for good training material for their recent recruits, can skim the material, highlight areas for a recommendation, or simply strike out content where their perspective differs from what is noted here. Typically, the readers’ own experiences will lead them to focus on appropriate sections of the book. After Part I, which is primarily a foundational, industry concept introduction chapter, in Part II and Part III of the book, readers will find key takeaways at the end of each topic for easy reading and consumption.

Overall, this book will act as a reference as you engage with your customers in this role. Unfortunately, the customer success role is more art than science. The employment of the tactics outlined here will come with practice and experience as you mature in this role.