Customer Success

Chapter 13

Law 9: Drive Customer Success through Hard Metrics

Author: Jon Herstein, Senior Vice President of Customer Success, Box

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Executive Summary

Customer success is still relatively new as a formal organization within the enterprise. As with any new business endeavor, maturity is required to ensure long-term viability. It's that time for customer success. Repeatability, process definition, measurement, and optimization are the hallmarks of that maturation. We see glimpses of these at more mature recurring revenue businesses, but there's still a long way to go for most.

Ultimately, the purpose of customer success, like any other part of a thriving company, is to achieve real business outcomes. Defining what success means both for you and for your customers, then establishing clear metrics that will deliver those business outcomes, is a necessary part of accelerating the maturation process. You can't improve what you don't measure.

In the late 1980s, Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute began to develop a process maturity framework that would help organizations improve their software process. Published several years later, the Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM) became the go-to reference for assessing the process maturity of software development organizations. Equally important, the CMM framework has been used as a more generalized reference ...