Table 3.

Business examples of customer success management.

Conceptual Basis	Definition	Business Challenge	CSM Based Solution	Business Outcome
Philosophical	CSM forefronts the customer as the primary actor striving to achieve its own goals. Rather than adopting the traditional sales narrative with the seller as the primary actor offering something that the customer receives and experiences, CSM adopts a customer as actor narrative with the implicit belief that if customers are successful then the providers enabling the customers will also be successful.	ADP sales reps had difficulty getting referrals since clients struggled with product adoption and achieving ROI based outcomes.	ADP recognized that retention, account expansion, and referrals are lagging indicators. ADP shifts focus toward driving client success metrics including driving outcomes and adoption. Additionally, ADP's customer help design new Customer Success processes.	51% of clients have established success plans and 73% of revenue secured under contract.
Organizational	CSM often manifests as a new functional unit in a selling firm's organizational structure that unites marketing, sales, and support functions. Across all CSM structural approaches, the objective is interoperability of disperse resources toward the customer's goal achievement	Actualize Microsoft's new mission statement to: “Empower every person in every organization on the planet to do more.”	Reorganized their enterprise operating units to include a distinct customer unit with over 2000 employees focused on helping customers realize value, grow consumption, and bring the voice of the customer back into Microsoft.	“Customer Success has become an obsession with Microsoft's sprawling cloud business…Because ultimately in a consumption-based business, customer success is all that matters.” —Microsoft CFO Amy Hood (in Forbes)
Research Streams
Goal Management	CSM based goal management is concerned with helping customers determine goals and identify effective goal-means that lead to goal pursuit achievement	Rapid 7 users reported high NPS and loyalty scores, but also felt they were not succeeding at their jobs.	Rapid 7 shifts to new customer goal based metrics where success is determined by how well the users feel they are successful in achieving outcomes and whether their bosses judge them to be successful.	Gaining a better understanding of the jobs customers are really trying to get done is transforming product management and development.
Stakeholder Management	CSM based stakeholder management is concerned with understanding and managing relationships with the customer and the customer's stakeholder groups including management teams and front-line employees, other suppliers and providers, and the customer firm's customers.	CampusLogic focused on a generalist CSM model. After introducing a third product line, customer stakeholders were not being understood and properly managed.	CampusLogic introduced CSM customer tiering to introduce a specialist model where specific customer stakeholder could be segmented, understood, and managed.	Successfully grew CS team of 1 with 35 customers and 1 product to a CS team of 30 with 500 customers and 5 products
Learning Management	CSM based learning management is concerned with helping customers assimilate goal-means toward goal pursuit achievement	IBM 2015 CSM team is fully reactive focused on support tickets and is customer escalation based. Customer health scores are completely subjective.	Test conducted on one product line. CSM is retooled to generate proactive customer health scores and usage information to generate customer learnings.	33% better health score. 11× adoption growth in 13 months.