This blog describes a framework for thinking through the different elements of a CS strategy.

True customer success is not an add-on or an appendix to a company strategy.  Rather, it is shaped by and, as importantly shapes the fundamentals of the business.   The decisions needed to develop a meaningful CS strategy require the leadership team to formalise things that many companies have, at best, not fully agreed and, at worst, have not addressed. 

CS strategy requires decisions in three main areas;

• The company’s strategic framework sets out what problems the company solves for its chosen customers and how it delivers its products and services in a profitable, scalable way.  CS has to help shape this.

• This sets the context for the CS delivery model, the core of customer success.  This the process through which the company delivers measurable value (ROI) to the customer in a repeatable, scalable and profitable way.  

• The final element is the CS organisation: how CS, in its broader sense is staffed to deliver.  Depending on the decisions around the company’s strategic framework and the CS commercial model, this may well include skills and staffing in customer success, product, sales and marketing.

I am in the process of building an expanded version of the framework into the CS Vision & Strategy module of the FREE online CS Leadership Program. Watch for further announcements!