The art and the science of Customer Success
We help companies that have the vision to build around customers, turn value statements into results.
Customer success is more than a team, it's the ethos and promise that unites every team and player in a company that wants to walk the talk of customer centricity. An effective customer success strategy is the most cost effective way to scale recurring revenue businesses, rewarding regard with insight, loyalty and meaningful growth. With the right data, systems thinking and drive to treat customers challenges as your own, a sustainable growth engine is in reach.
Getting it right is more than any one team can achieve alone and authentic alignment behind customer success as an ethos is critical to success. Our consultants have a broad background across customer facing roles including sales, consulting and support as well as deep operational experience which means they are well placed to align seemingly disparate objectives effectively.
Talk to us about turning intent into results.
Customer intelligence
Customer success cannot exist without effective customer intelligence. The ability to effectively perceive customer objectives and attitudes is critical to long term success and with shrinking margins and lengthening sales cycles, only getting more important.
Tragically under-invested in, customer intelligence doesn't have to cost a lot but it must be assessed critically, measured systemically and align with objectives understood across the business.
Our team can help you to; simplify data collection from CRM, platform and direct means; build statistically-sound models to identify and evaluate insights and; build a framework to understand and compare customer input effectively across all functions and life cycle stages.
Talk to us about how to improve the breadth of customer input, drive certainty in findings and simplify priorities.
Fractional leadership
Ownership of the customer perspective at the most senior levels of the business is critical to consistently and efficiently, placing customers at the heart of business. A chief customer officer or equivalent is more than a departmental lead, they are an insightful collaborator for every department, a catalyst for delivering against commercial needs, company-wide.
Now might not be the time to invest in a full-time CCO / CXO but ensuring ownership of customer insight and how this impacts each customer touch point and the product road map is important. Here's the kicker, much like the role of data protections officer (DPO) this role needs to be free from competing priorities - the owner of specific parts of the customer journey is unlikely to be a great fit long term.
Talk to us about establishing unbiased customer ownership for your executive team or engaging a part-time professional to establish and maintain customer input across your business.
Customer ecosystems
With the right data and commitment the scene is set to realise a customer led vision but customer operations is where vision becomes reality. Having smart, timely insights and hardwiring them to decision making is fantastic but competitive advantage is amplified when they're evident in process and customer touch-points.
As with insight and strategy, operations are best approached holistically and from the customer's perspective. This does not mean revising everything at once or bundling every process into one monolithic super-process but it does mean promoting shared purpose and sticking to smart priorities.
Talk to us about mapping the customer journey, building out automations and, serving team specific requirements cross-functionally. Our consultants have broad experience successfully uniting commercial, creative and service focused teams with tooling, process and incentives.
The art and the science of Customer Success
Explore CS principals, evolving best practices and data methodologies discovered, honed and broken over nearly 20 years as a customer champion and executive leader in growing B2B businesses.
Hello, I'm Kelvin Claridge
I have spent nearly 20 years immersed in the world of customer success and SaaS operations as a high-performing individual contributor, manager and executive leader. In that time I have had the pleasure of attaining, supporting and growing multi-million-dollar relationships with some of the world's largest businesses including Bank of America, Coca-Cola and WPP and the privilege of leading incredible teams to achieve commercial results and efficiencies far beyond expectation.
My career has spanned the entire customer life cycle including amazing tenures in consultancy, account management, technical & professional services, support, sales and marketing. All of these roles, whether they had "customer success" in their titles or not, have been dedicated to helping customers make their ambitions a reality.
My proudest moments among successful tenders, hard-won renewals, speaking engagements and a PE exit, are seeing the colleagues I've mentored build tremendous careers leading departments and businesses of their own.
Invention, empathy and data are central to my work. I am committed to empowering CS teams - well, any function with it's priorities right - to learn arts and sciences from other functions so that they can demonstrably exceed more customer objectives, more quickly.
Contact
hello@theartandthescience.com
© Kelvin Claridge 2024, original image (colourful ribbon) by kjpargeter on Freepik
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