Customer Success for Traditional Nonrecurring Revenue Businesses

Today, customer success is largely centered in the world of B2B SaaS companies. As we've discussed, it's the urgency created by the subscription model that has driven the need for customer success and placed it into the business consciousness. But, does it apply to other businesses as well?

The answer is a resounding, yes. The need for customer success concepts, by any name, is being discovered and, in some cases, rediscovered by many B2C and non-technology companies for a variety of reasons including:

1. Most companies are thinking about how to become a subscription-based business or at least create some subscription-based products.
2. Creating great customer experiences and ensuring that customers derive true business value from your products pays off. Even in a nonsubscription business, repeat business is key. If you live in a world where that's true, then consider how customer success can help you.

Remember that the phrase customer success is simply another way of saying loyalty creation and especially attitudinal loyalty creation. In businesses in which physical customer success teams exist, they exist to drive loyalty, which results in retention and revenue growth. Loyal customers stay with you and buy more from you. Every company wants their customers to do both of those things. Subscriptions have become step one in the process for doing just that, which is why, with the help of technology, they are exploding into every market. But subscriptions aren't the Holy Grail; they are merely the starting point. With every subscription comes the reality that we've handed much of the power over to the customer, and that means you must deliver what they need or want in order to get your desired business results. That's where customer success comes in, whether that's a team of people intervening directly with your customers or technology helping you deliver relevant and timely messages to them to make their experience better.

Are Subscriptions Only for Software and Magazines?

Let's start by looking at the expansion of the subscription economy beyond software because it's such a key element in the growth and importance of customer success. There are subscriptions that have been around for years and that we're accustomed to:

• Magazines
• Fitness centers
• Cable TV
• Country clubs
• Traditional technology (hardware/software maintenance)

Newer ones we're rapidly adopting:

• Movies (Netflix)
• Satellite radio (SiriusXM)
• Music (Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music)
• Diet programs (Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers)
• HSA plans (all major insurance carriers)
• Grocery delivery (Instacart)

And those that have yet to change our lives but may soon:

• Razors (Dollar Shave Club)
• Meals (Blue Apron, EAT Club)
• Health drinks (Soylent)
• Package delivery (Amazon Prime)
• Prescriptions (PillPack)
• Fitness centers V2 (ClassPass)

Every business in the world is thinking about how to become subscription based. You don't think Starbucks execs are talking about the right price for an unlimited coffee subscription? If it's less than $50 per month, you can count me in. And what about a company like Uber? You can bet there are teams of data scientists combing through the numbers and trying to come up with an Uber subscription—all the rides you want in San Francisco for $225 a month, maybe? That would stop a lot of people from taking the occasional taxi or using Lyft when that might be slightly more convenient. These programs are supremely powerful because they deliver two things that every company craves and loves: predictable revenue and loyalty. Both of those concepts are bidirectional, too. As customers, we tend to love predictable expenses just as businesses love predictable revenue. That's why many consumers choose to pay the same amount to their power company every month instead of worrying about the highs and lows caused by seasonality. The other point is a bit more subtle, but human nature bends toward loyalty as a positive thing, even a badge of honor. Have you ever heard a conversation between a Ford truck owner and a Chevy truck owner? Loyalty to the point of fisticuffs in some parts of the world. We just want to be proud of the decisions we've made, which means our loyalty is there for the taking, and a subscription model is the perfect device for taking and servicing that desire for loyalty.

The concepts mentioned previously have been in place and building loyalty for years, from any company that offers a frequent flyer/shopper program. By definition, companies that offer these programs are in the pay-as-you-go business, and, as we mentioned earlier, pay-as-you-go looks very much like a subscription business when it comes to managing customers. Frequent shopper programs offer all sorts of reasons for you to continue to do your business with one company, forsaking all others. When I rent a car these days, it's always from National Car Rental. They have all my information, allow me to walk straight to where the cars are, select the one I want, and drive to the exit, where all I have to do is show my driver's license. Amazingly convenient compared with the nonmember process, which includes lines, forms, and lots of initials and signatures. Now that I'm locked in, it's highly unlikely I'd rent from another company unless they found a way to make my life even easier, such as delivering my rental to the exit where I'll be coming out of the airport and letting me drop it off where I want to.

The frequent x industry that first comes to mind is obviously the airlines with their frequent-flyer programs. As I was pondering the writing of this book, a friend of mine asked me whether customer success was applicable outside of SaaS. My knee-jerk response was, “not really.” But then he challenged me with a simple question: “What happens when the United flight you are scheduled to be on later today is delayed?” The answer: I get a text message informing me of the delay and either the new estimated time of departure or the expected time of the next update. Isn't that customer success? United Airlines certainly wants me to fly on its planes as often as possible. Because air travel is anything but a perfect experience, part of what United needs to do to be successful is to keep me informed when things are not going according to plan. Thus, the text message when a flight is delayed, when a gate change takes place, or informing me where my luggage is when it didn't get on the same flight as me.

Much of the daily job of the CSM in a SaaS company has to do with setting and resetting customer expectations, too. The new release that was planned to ship on Thursday is now delayed two weeks. The reporting feature the customer wanted has now slipped into the October release. Or, on the positive side, the premium support program we've promised is available starting today, not September 1 as we originally planned. All of these are part of what CSMs do every day and are analogous to what United Airlines is doing when they keep me informed and my expectations realistic. And these outreaches are part of an improved customer experience, which leads to retention in the same way that the perks of the frequent-flyer program do. It's all part of the customer journey, and the core philosophy of customer success is simply to maximize the value the customer receives from your product(s) to keep them coming back. This idea clearly crosses over from B2B SaaS to nontechnology companies and to B2C companies.

Let's look at one more example of the world moving toward a subscription model. Did you know that Volkswagen is now a SaaS company? It's true. In their new vehicles, they are shipping Apple's CarPlay functionality standard. That's not really news as lots of auto companies are doing that with either CarPlay or Android Auto. What is new is that Volkswagen has extended CarPlay with its own set of Car-Net applications, which will allow you access to features such as remote lock control, remote honk and flash, parking information, stolen vehicle location, automatic crash notifications, diagnostics, and vehicle monitoring. And here's where it becomes SaaS: CarPlay is standard, but the Volkswagen-specific Car-Net apps are an upgrade that costs $199 per year. Did you catch that last part? Per year! The birth of another SaaS company—shipping software for which a monthly or annual fee is required. And that's surely just the beginning. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a car company offering a subscription-based vehicle ownership program. For $650 a month, you can choose from any of 15 car models that you'd like to drive, and you can switch cars, within your allocated plan, whenever you like. Because software is eating (and connecting) the world, each car you choose will be delivered to you with your radio stations preprogrammed, your seat preferences preset, and your temperature controls exactly the way you like them. In addition, your registration and insurance will be digitally accessible from the car's software and displayable on screen to any police officer to whom you wish to show them. And then those car companies will be looking to hire you, the readers of this book, in a desperate attempt to find customer success expertise as it will be required in a whole new way for them to be successful.

And there's not a business that won't be affected by these changes. If car companies, prescription providers, and over-the-air radio are all moving toward subscriptions, is there any doubt that every business will at least try to do the same? It's a way to create or ensure loyalty and to expand your business, making it more accessible to customers who otherwise might not have been in your target market.

Delivering Customer Success

Although the customer success philosophy is basically the same, there are some major differences with regard to how it is delivered by different companies. Here are three examples with rough estimates of customers and ASPs:

1. Workday—hundreds of customers at $1 million/year
2. Clarizen—thousands of customers at $15,000/year
3. Netflix—millions of customers at $10/month

It's pretty obvious that these three companies cannot manage customer success in the same way. Workday can afford to throw some bodies at their customers, such as product and domain experts who can spend significant time helping customers to understand and effectively use their products. Clarizen can do the same with certain customers but also needs to worry about scaling for the long tail of lower value customers it wants to keep. Netflix can do nothing with its customers that isn't 100 percent automated. No phone calls or meetings ever happen regularly between a Netflix CSM and a customer. There's clearly a hierarchy of customer value here and an associated touch model for each level. For many companies, this model can be applied to their entire customer base, with different customers falling into each of the three categories (see Figure 3.1).

Let's examine more closely what customer success looks like at each tier in the pyramid. Understanding this is essential in visualizing how customer success applies to every business regardless of size and regardless of the size of their customers.

High touch. This model is, by definition, the most people-intensive, but that expense is justified by the price the customer is paying for the product. This model is most commonly deployed in SaaS companies, such as Workday, that have customers paying significant amounts of money for their products. However, it's not exclusive to SaaS by any means. Think about a contract between DIRECTV and Marriott to provide television options to every room in every Marriott hotel worldwide. You can bet there's someone at DIRECTV responsible for managing that critical business relationship and who has significant authority for getting things done across every organization in the company in order to satisfy such an important customer. That's customer success regardless of what it's called—driving loyalty by delivering value.

The high-touch model often consists of frequent interactions, some scheduled, some not, between the vendor and customer. Great high-touch customer success is usually a predefined mixture of the scheduled and unscheduled. Typical scheduled interactions might include:

• A defined onboarding process
• Coordinated handoffs between vendor groups
• Monthly status meetings
• Executive business reviews (EBRs; biannually or quarterly)
• On-site visits (might be very frequent or annually)
• Regular health checks
• Upcoming renewal (if subscription based)

Unscheduled interactions are usually data driven and proactive from the vendor to the customer and designed to mitigate a perceived risk:

• Multiple outages
• Too many customer support/customer service calls
• Declining usage of the product
• Invoices overdue by more than X days

One thing you'll notice about unscheduled interactions is that they would probably compel action on the part of the vendor whether they are operating in a high-touch model or a tech-touch model. You can imagine alarm bells going off at Netflix if a previously prolific customer suddenly went 60 days without requesting a movie. That wouldn't stimulate a phone call to the customer but might very well start an e-mail campaign or initiate the sending of some kind of automated reminder.

In the high-touch model, all of these interactions are probably personal, whether phone calls or face-to-face. The key challenge is to optimize the customer touches to create maximum benefit for the associated cost. And because the associated costs are people-heavy, they tend to be relatively very expensive. This expense is a reasonable cost of doing business with customers who are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (or more) for your products, but they still need to be optimized to deliver maximum business benefit for both the customer and the vendor.

For the vendor, this is obviously a critical business process because the high-touch model is typically applied only to your most valuable customers: customers whose loss would be catastrophic not only financially but also in many other ways. The application of expensive resources in a high-touch model usually has a very simple retention goal—100.00 percent. Anything less is most likely a major failure. The customers who receive this high-touch treatment are also often those with great opportunity for expansion. Think back to the hypothetical DIRECTV and Marriott relationship. What are the odds that Marriott will build or acquire more hotels? Highly likely, right? Every new room results in additional dollars for DIRECTV if they keep Marriott happy. It's a long-term play that goes beyond 100 percent retention but is expected to grow the value of that relationship financially over time, too.

It's pretty easy to see how high-touch customer success applies in nontechnology and B2C businesses just as it does in B2B SaaS. In the DIRECTV/Marriott example, DIRECTV is primarily a B2C company but clearly with a set of customers who force them to operate as a B2B vendor. Marriott wouldn't be the only customer fitting that bill either. Any sports bar chain, such as Buffalo Wild Wings, that wants to provide every possible sporting event on one of their 35 big screens at every one of their locations, will look a lot like Marriott from a relationship standpoint. DIRECTV is not alone in dealing with this challenge (or opportunity). Many businesses, perhaps most, do not fit cleanly into one model or the other. Dropbox is another company that started as a pure B2C play, but once they realized that many of the consumers using their application worked for the same companies, they began to think about B2B and enterprise and have now become a vendor serving both businesses and consumers.

A nontechnology company that knows a little something about high-touch customer success is Bright Horizons. If you have kids and work for a large company, you may know who they are. Bright Horizons provides childcare options to large companies who want to include that as part of their employees' benefits package. As you can imagine, these contracts with major employers are critical for Bright Horizons. So they have a team of people who manage those relationships with the intention of delivering high levels of retention and growing those relationships financially. Growth happens through upselling other capabilities that Bright Horizons can offer such as backup childcare, educational services, and even eldercare. As you can see, because of the subscription nature of both businesses, Workday and Bright Horizons provide high-touch customer success to their customers with the same intentions:

• Product adoption: Workday wants customers to use their software and get real value from it. Bright Horizons wants the employees of their customers to use their services to make their lives better.
• Customer satisfaction: great references sell in every business. There's nothing like good word-of-mouth to spread the word about a product or service that really works. And there's nothing like customer testimonials to enhance your sales process.
• Upsell: successful and happy customers buy more stuff from you. That's just the way it works. If you have more products and services to offer, your best customers are your most likely buyers and the cost of sales to them is massively smaller.
• Retention: this is always at the core of customer success. Driving loyalty, not just for the sake of loyalty and warm, fuzzy feelings, but because it's a business imperative if you run a recurring revenue business.

In many ways, the high-touch model is the easiest to staff, deploy, and execute. People and companies have been doing high-touch account management forever, so it's not hard to find people with the right customer-facing skills and brainpower to figure out how to deliver success to their customers. It's primarily a relationship job enhanced with business savvy. But don't think that technology doesn't play a role here. It most certainly does. But the role of technology for high-touch models is primarily about communication, collaboration, and management and not so much about automation or optimizing who to touch and when. We'll discuss technology in more detail in a later chapter.

Low touch. As you can imagine, the low-touch customer success model is a blend of the high-touch and tech-touch models, combining elements of each. The low-touch model is for those tweener customers, not quite big enough or strategic enough to warrant the white-glove treatment of the high-touch customers but important enough that you are willing to do some level of one-on-one touch with them. As with any three-tier model, the middle tier inevitably becomes the mushy middle creating fuzzy lines both at the top and at the bottom. But dividing lines must be drawn no matter how thin the line might be between the least valuable high-touch customer and the most valuable low-touch customer and similarly at the bottom of the tier.

If you are not a pure tech-touch company, which many B2C companies have to be, then you'll almost certainly have a tier of customers that can accurately be defined as low touch. One way to think about the model for managing these customers is just-in-time customer success.

Just-in-time is a phrase I've stolen here from the world of manufacturing. It's also often referred to as the Toyota Production System (TPS) because it was pioneered in Toyota manufacturing plants in the 1960s. Early in the days of mass production manufacturing, huge warehouses were required to stock the inventory of parts and materials required by the manufacturing line to build the products that had been sold or committed. Those warehouses and that inventory were extremely expensive parts of the process. The combination of smart businesspeople looking to save money along with the improvement in ordering and transportation systems allowed companies to reduce the amount of inventory they kept on hand by having it delivered much closer to the time of actual need. In a perfect system, the part that the assembly-line person needs to put on the car she is building arrives at the station just as she reaches for it, having come straight off the truck and never even stopping to be counted as inventory.

Customer success for low-touch customers can operate in a similar way, thus the stealing of the phrase just-in-time (JIT). JIT customer success means providing exactly what the customer needs at exactly the right time. Not a minute before or a minute after. These customers are not valuable enough for you to store inventory for them. Inventory in this case would be an abundance of guidance, education, or handholding, all of which also lead to something priceless—goodwill. In other words, JIT also means just enough. In the high-touch model, lots of inventory/goodwill is stored up because of the number of interactions that take place with each of those customers. It's worth going the extra mile and perhaps doing more than what is necessary because of the importance of these customers. In the low-touch model, you can't afford to do as many interactions, so you will end up driving toward the bare minimum. But, in this model, the bare minimum still includes a reasonable degree of one-on-one touch. By contrast, the tech-touch model removes one-on-one touch completely.

Not surprisingly, low touch starts to incorporate elements of tech-touch to complement the one-on-one touches. Let's revisit the set of scheduled touches that we defined for our high-touch model:

• A defined onboarding process
• Coordinated handoffs between vendor groups
• Monthly status meetings
• Executive business reviews (biannually or quarterly)
• On-site visits (might be very frequent or annually)
• Regular health checks
• Upcoming renewal (if subscription based)

In the low-touch model, many of these might still be relevant. You may completely eliminate some of them such as on-site visits, and you'll almost certainly change the frequency of most of them. A version of the above list updated for low-touch customers might then look like this:

• A defined packaged onboarding process
• Coordinated handoffs between vendor groups only from sales to onboarding
• Monthly status meetings
• EBRs (bi-annually or quarterly annually)
• On-site visits (might be very frequent or annually)
• Regular automated health checks
• Upcoming Auto-renewal (if subscription based)

Similarly, the unscheduled touches would be carefully altered to minimize the expense. In this case, the thresholds might simply be raised (or lowered, depending on your point of view). For example, if more than 10 support/services requests in a 30-day period triggered an outreach for high-touch customers, maybe that number goes to 20 for low-touch customers. In addition, technology will come more into play as you can see for scheduled touches. Perhaps the first three outreaches for an invoice that's overdue are all e-mails, and then the first two one-on-one touches are performed by a junior finance person rather than a more expensive CSM.

It's obvious that the tiers and associated touch models are all about driving your business toward profitability or at least viability. In a healthy customer success–focused company, the tiers and touch models are well defined and are used as headcount drivers. If we look back at the high-touch model, it's fairly easy to estimate the amount of time it will take a CSM to prepare and perform each of the tasks and how often the unscheduled ones will occur. Taking into account that some portion of any CSM's time is going to be spent in internal meetings or doing non-customer-facing activities, you should be able to estimate the CSM time required each year/month/week with any given customer, which will in turn define how many customers a CSM can manage. Voila! Your headcount model.

Two quick comments here. (1) Your first pass at this is highly likely to show you the need for far more heads than your CFO or CEO will allow you to have. But at least you'll have a model you can tweak and around which you can have intelligent conversations about which tasks to eliminate or automate to reduce the headcount needs. (2) You'll find that the best way to determine CSM ratios is not by number of customers but by contract value (ARR). All customers are not created equal, so a $2 million per year customer can't be counted the same as a $20,000 per year customer. As a counterpoint, it's much harder to manage one hundred $20,000 customers than one $2 million customer, so keep that in mind, too.

Just as with the high-touch model, the low-touch model is fully applicable to many nontechnology and B2C businesses. Some B2C businesses, for example, have a surprisingly small target market and thus relatively small customer bases. That allows for the low-touch techniques we have just discussed to be applied in those situations. Tech-touch is not always the only option just because a company is primarily B2C.

One example of this type of company is Nipro Diagnostics. Among their many products is a self-monitoring blood glucose meter for home diabetes diagnostics. The consumer has to purchase the meter once and then replenish the test strips on a regular basis. The meter delivers the results to a mobile device using Bluetooth, and they can then be shared with the user's health-care provider. Home health care enabled by technology is a significant worldwide trend that is barely in its infancy. But the point of the story is that the glucose meter and the associated test strips, which can be delivered directly to your home, are simply a home health-care version of razors and blades. The need to replenish the user's supply of test strips on a regular basis makes this essentially a subscription model à la Dollar Shave Club. And because the customer base is relatively small, the customer success model can be a combination of low touch and tech touch. Low touch is done through the health-care provider (channel partner) who helps the consumer understand how to use the product effectively and how consistent use provides great value to their overall health and peace of mind. Tech touch is done directly through the device delivering the results of each test to the user almost immediately. Effective customer success is a fundamental component of this business model, including the possibility of intervention if too much time lapses and the customer has not renewed his order of test strips. Nipro Diagnostics may know nothing about Silicon Valley's new secret sauce—customer success—but its business model demands an effective management of its customers, which ensures that Nipro delivers on the promise of its product. It matters not what they call it. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Tech touch. This model may be the most complex and interesting of all. How do you deliver timely and relevant customer success to your customers without ever talking to them directly? Because the SaaS model lowers the barrier to entry for customers and the cost of sales for the vendor, it also broadens each market, often significantly. Ultimately, this almost always leads to a long tail of low-value customers. Individually, they do not have a lot of strategic or financial value, but, collectively, they often play a major role in the vendor's financial results. For the long tail, tech-touch customer success is a necessity. For most B2C companies, it's not just a necessity, it's the only choice.

Tech touch simply means that all customer touches are technology driven. Another way to say this is that all touches need to be one-to-many. One-to-one touches are far too expensive and clearly can't scale to handle the volumes of customers we're talking about. Oftentimes, a conversation about tech-touch centers on e-mail. Although e-mail is a powerful tool in the customer success arsenal for tech-touch customers, it's not the only tool. Other one-to-many channels exist, too, such as

• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Communities (online portals for sharing ideas and talking virtually to other customers)
• User groups
• Customer summits

Any vehicle that allows you to interact with more than one customer at a time, or moves those interactions to another source (Communities), is an option for executing customer success at scale. Let's explore e-mail in some depth as it's arguably the most powerful, offering the ability to be very timely, highly relevant, and information driven. E-mail marketing is also a well-understood discipline, and the technology behind it has been vetted and hardened over the past decade.

Targeted e-mail marketing has taken the world by storm over the past dozen years. Three providers of marketing automation software were successful enough to do an IPO—Eloqua, Marketo, and Hubspot. Two other software providers, focused primarily on the B2C world, Responsys and Exact Target, also did very successful IPOs. And each of those companies, at one point, achieved a market valuation in excess of $1 billion. That's clear proof that there was really some there there. The core concept of targeted e-mail marketing is pretty simple. Create smart e-mail campaigns based on demographic and behavioral knowledge of prospects to lead them down the buying path. These campaigns have become very sophisticated with complex branching logic and multichannel intelligence. However, it's all been aimed at the top of the funnel—customer acquisition. But the times, they are a-changin.'

Now targeted e-mail marketing is coming to customer success, and it applies the same concepts to customers (instead of prospects), helping them along the customer journey and leading them to successful use of your product. It's still demand generation at its core, but with a twist. For existing customers, it's about creating demand for the product they already own. Remember our euphemism for customer success—building loyalty. The goal of customer e-mail campaigns is not solely to get customers to buy more, although you will occasionally target customers for that purpose. It's to reinforce the purchase they've already made or help them use that product more effectively so that they remain loyal, either by renewing their contracts or choosing to not opt-out. The real power in using e-mail is that, once the infrastructure is in place, sending the e-mails is essentially free and highly scalable. For companies with large customer bases, this capability is a lifesaver because, although there are other one-to-many channels at their disposal, e-mail is the most effective. Let's dig into why that is the case.

Effective e-mails need to be timely, relevant, and include useful information. Similar to the marketing automation scenario described earlier for prospects, there is a lot of information available about customers that can be used to create highly effective e-mails. In fact, there is far more information available about customers than there is about prospects. Here's a partial list of what you probably know about customers across your enterprise:

• Original contract date
• Length of time as a customer
• Industry
• Geography
• Contacts
• Contract value
• Contract growth rate
• Number of support calls
• Severity level of each support case
• Number of days each support case was open
• Number of invoices delivered
• Number of invoices paid
• Number of invoices overdue when paid
• Average time to pay invoices
• Customer Sat scores and trends
• Customer health score and trends
• If you are a subscription SaaS company:
  • Renewal date
  • Every single click ever made in your product

And that list could go on much longer. But the point is made. There is a lot of data about your customers, which allows you deep intelligence into when to contact them and with what message. That kind of touch can be done at scale via e-mail.

Let's take a look at a specific scenario. Let's say you are a SaaS company, and you released a new reporting feature a couple of months ago that many of your customers have been waiting eagerly for, some for more than six months. Because it's a feature that makes your product much stickier, it's in your best interest to make sure all customers are using it. With the help of the right technology, you can now identify the power user and administrator at every customer who has not yet touched this new feature and send them the following e-mail:

Now tell me that kind of e-mail wouldn't be extremely powerful in your attempts to drive value to your customers. And the same e-mail, with personalized content, could be sent to 20 or 1,000 different customers at the same time and at the same cost—$0. Even if you operate in a low-touch customer success model in which you can afford some one-to-one touches, this might save you 15 phone calls and 30-minute discussions with your customers. If you are in a pure tech-touch model, then there's a good chance your customers have gotten very few touches at all over the years, and this is a chance to truly blow them away with value. If you are a mature B2C company or volume B2B company, there's a good chance you are already doing some kind of targeted loyalty campaigns. It might be disguised as customer marketing or it's part of the user experience in your product: recommendation engines are just another form of customer success. In any case, the need for building loyalty with existing customers has become apparent and may be addressed in some way but is likely not as well defined or executed as you need it to be. It's definitely the customer's world today, and we're just living in it. Customer success is simply the acknowledgment and embracing of that reality. If you haven't already, it might be time to bring those ideas together in one organization or at least a common initiative. One trend in maturing SaaS companies today is that customer marketing is moving closer and closer to customer success, if not under that umbrella already.

Clearly, the tech-touch customer success model is highly applicable to almost any business. Even if you are strictly high touch, there are still some tasks CSMs do that could be automated, giving them more time for strategic activities. Most important, the tech-touch model allows any business to start delivering customer success almost immediately, even if you don't have CSMs or don't call it customer success. The example we just used was built around e-mail, but the earlier example I used from United Airlines involved text messaging, which is potentially even more effective if used properly. Digitized voice messages could also be delivered at scale if that channel might occasionally delight your customers.

The bottom line is simply that customer success can be delivered at scale in an effective and highly relevant way for your customers. Technology has made it possible, and more and more companies are starting to take advantage of that capability.

I hope we've established now that customer success is highly relevant no matter what kind of business you are running. Whether you are B2B SaaS, B2C SaaS, not SaaS but subscription based, not subscription based yet but moving in that direction, or pay-as-you-go, you have a direct need for customer success. This is true whether you have 10 $50 million customers or 50 million $10 customers. In some way, you are probably already doing customer success although you may be referring to it as customer experience, account management, or customer marketing. The name of the organization is really irrelevant. It's the mission and the goal that are important. And if the goal is to drive retention or increase the dollar value of your existing customers, viewing them through the lens of customer success is becoming fundamentally important, and, as with any new idea that is changing business, technology is rushing in to assist in the process.