As The SaaS Economy Expands, How Will We Define Authentic B2B Customer Success

Pivotal changes with software as a service have led us to a world where support matters, but it matters as a living, 24/7/365 component for the customer’s portfolio of experiences. These SaaS experiences are transforming how we think, feel, and react to experiences in near real-time and how we personally define success even in a business-to-business landscape. Once the infrequent measurement of NPS and CSAT was enough to satiate our appetites and anxieties about how we keep customers happy. These were mostly resolution or incident-based and created a metric to ask if we did a good job. 

There are a lot of concepts in this podcast about the re framing of customer success by 2030. Once experiences become experienced continuously as a service, these dynamic shifts and shift very fast.  

Being delighted isn’t just about resolution; it’s also about predictive actions that delight us. Think about Tesla and how it uses usage knowledge to drive better decisions and experiences. We have all read about how a car has its suspension reset an inch or two higher to avoid bumps in the road. Power in customer success will come from the application of living streams or critical moments in data either before or as it matters.  

This is a radically different world than in many cases now but is likely to be the norm as companies move to a data-rich, Ai infused support process. The ability to rethink business models will come from this constant stream of usage data from huger power systems to sensors and embedded devices working through the native cloud to a 5G enriched Edge. Imagine a company selling a dirt digging service how much cargo can be extracted via the most optimum way based on data and sensors versus just selling a digging machine.  

Customer success will likely be complicated to achieve by 2030 unless we radically evolve how we think the design and build fundamentally different business models with customers. Visibility to how customers are using products or services in real-time will be the fuel for this new customer success revolution. So Business-to-Business companies that can embrace this real-time pressure will likely thrive. 

Endless questions about how to get those insights faster and better will feed predictive decision making in the new customer success world. This need for constant feedback will make the idea of continuous revisions as the norm. Tesla illustrates this constant morphing of customer success with through the air uploads delivered without an owner’s knowledge.  

The same will be right in Business-to-Business products that could be re-tasked on the fly. In a world functioning five to ten times faster than now, the idea of just measuring NPS or CSAT scores becomes laughably slow as an approach to a dynamic world of success. 

Here are four tips for thinking about the architecture for future customer success in a digitally transforming world:

• Think about your products and services as data collecting systems that should throw light on how to build customer success for you as a Business-to-Business supplier and the customer.
• Customer success means Business-to-Business companies will need to be entrenched much more in the customer’s design processes than ever before.
• Increasingly online becomes the only way Business-to-Business companies will interact with customers. This will be done through all types of devices (IoT, Embedded, etc.), which will drive far more effective relationships for both parties. 
• Business-to-Business companies are going to have to existentially re-build the business model to focus on selling the value moments. For example, don’t buy the HVAC pay for what it does; maybe we pay for average temperatures achieved and the cost of delivery.

Amit Ronen is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Wind River, a leader in mission-critical, real-time embedded technologies. Amit is a graduate of the University of Tel Aviv (B.A. Computer Sciences and Economics and a graduate of the Stanford University Executive Program (SEP). 

He was an executive with Mercury Interactive and a founding partner for Mercury Interactive in Japan.

If you want to reach Amit Ronen, please reach him on LinkedIn.