The Power of Customer Success
Customer Success is one of the most important strategic priorities at Spotlight Reporting. The more we learn about Customer Success principles, strategy and practice, the more we can see the powerful resonance this could have for accountants in practice.
What is Customer Success?
Our definition of Customer Success is:
“Putting the customer at the heart of our decision-making to ensure that their desired outcomes are aligned with our own criteria for success.”
To put it simply, Customer Success means that we:
- Embed a process to enable customers to work towards transforming their practices.
- Allocate talented and industry-experienced humans to our key accounts, so that our most dedicated customers set goals, undertake bespoke training, put Spotlight Champions in place, and execute on sales and marketing ideas.
- Ensure that our Customer Success Specialists contribute to our customers’ transformation journey.
- Set our company, team and individual KPI’s to measure our customer satisfaction, retention and growth. If customers don’t win, our KPI’s suffer and everyone from the Board, CEO, leadership team and front-liners assesses shortfalls and iterate our approach.
- Adopt ‘portfolio management’ principles ensuring periodic, disciplined and useful interactions with our customers.
- Create content that resonates with our customers and is focused on actionable activity driving a return on investment for our customers (such as our ‘7 Ways to Grow Advisory Revenue‘ and ‘Embedding cash flow advisory services‘).
- Ensure that product decisions are based on consultation, research, observation and customer input (alongside our own internal Product leadership, of course).
- Resource our Support & Training to provide global, 24/7 coverage.
- Ensure that leadership team members (including me) have daily interaction with the lifeblood of our business – our customers; and
- Are not asking our customers to be successful without our help – we partner with them to drive lasting value. This is as important to us as it is to them.
We are fairly new to deploying a Customer Success Strategy and having a dedicated Customer Success Team, so of course we are still learning and making mistakes. But we have made a core commitment; and we are seeing some pleasing progress as we orientate ourselves towards the real and sustainable success of our subscribers.
Read our ‘Customer Success in Accounting’ blog post to learn about the importance of having a Customer Success programme at an accounting practice and the ways to implement it in your firm.