The concept of Customer Success (CS) is based on a single system that helps to understand how customers use the product, what business goals are achieved with it, what new scenarios are developing. This helps the vendor to improve the product and build further work with customers.
What is the difference from customer support?
Unlike traditional customer support, that mainly responds to problems as they arise, CS anticipates requests and complexities, helps implement the product and makes sure that the client gets the most out of it.
In the global context, the growth in the value of CS in the IT business was associated with the spread of the SaaS model, when software is purchased by subscription. For vendors, customer retention, development of long-term relationships and regular interaction with them are more important. After all, the basis of well-being in such a model is recurrent payments for subscriptions from regular users.
Product implementation and support have been an important part of the work before, especially when it comes to complex solutions and corporate customers. At the same time, the bulk of revenue, as a rule, was formed at the sales stage, and further interaction with the client was largely associated with solving emerging issues and ensuring the stable operation of the product.
With the development of the CS approach, customer interaction has become more proactive and results-oriented. For SaaS companies, it is becoming increasingly important to help the client integrate the product into their processes and receive long-term value from it. This approach creates the basis for a more stable and long-term relationship between the client and the vendor.
Russian specifics
For Russian IT vendors, the use of CS practices is becoming more and more relevant. If in 2022-2024 a significant part of the growth was provided by urgent import substitution projects, now the resource of “forced demand” is being exhausted. Consumers are increasingly evaluating domestic products in terms of their functionality, practical significance and effectiveness. In line with these trends, software sales growth is also slowing down. If in 2024, according to RUSSOFT, it was 28%, then in 2025 it was already 17.8%. The total net profit of market participants decreased by 34%.
This is where CS comes to the rescue, which becomes a tool for customer retention and subsequent sales. At the same time, it is able to have a positive impact on a variety of processes and stages of work, including presale, when the consumer needs to provide good reasons to spend money on software, post-launch scenarios, where after the sale it is necessary to prove that the solution gives a business result, refinement and development of products, since the development team receives valuable feedback.
Six system components
Our experience in developing the function has allowed us to highlight key elements in this work. Let’s analyze each of them.
1. Conduct an audit and find out what happens to the client after the sale. In order to build a CS system in a company, first of all, you need to find out the real state of affairs from existing customers: how they use products, what problems they face, where they receive less value. Analysis of the current client path will allow you to determine the real points of client loss and, based on them, form tasks and metrics for CS.
2. Describe the desired client path. When the product is technically launched, all the most important and interesting from the point of view of CS is just beginning. After starting, you need to make sure that employees are really using the system, the product is built into workflows and the client is moving towards the set business goals. The main stages of his journey may look like this:
- Diagnostics. Understand processes and identify necessary changes.
- Implementation of improvements. Make necessary changes to the product.
- Adaptation. Build the product into the processes and scenarios of the company.
- Launch. Bring to industrial launch.
- Usage. Ensure actual use of the product.
- Development. Extend scenarios and product value.
It is not necessary to create a rigid methodology with a large number of formal stages. It is more important that each of them has an understandable result.
3. Understand the real business task of the client. In corporate projects, the product changes not only the set of technologies used, but also processes, employee roles, interaction scenarios, security and integration requirements. Therefore, it is important to first determine which business task it should solve, how the corresponding process is now arranged, what will have to be changed by the client and what adjustments will be required in the solution itself. This can be increased profitability, reduced manual labor, changes or optimization of individual processes, reduced operational risks, etc.
4. Track the points at which the client gets stuck. CS is insurance against a customer getting stuck at certain points along his journey. A delay at one stage is a signal that something is going wrong. The task of CS is not just to see such a point and record the fact of the delay, but to understand the reasons and help overcome the difficulties.
To do this, we rely on indicators that help to assess the real state of the client and go beyond the formal status of the project. Among them there are metrics of launch, use and growth. The first group includes indicators reflecting the share of transactions that ended with the actual launch of the product, the time to launch and annual revenue from such contracts. The second category of indicators helps to assess how actively the product is used by customers. The third allows to track how interaction with customers is developing, whether there are additional sales, and what contribution CS makes to income.
5. Link Customer Success to product development. Here we identify new customer needs and look for ways to solve them. CS collects the context of the task, determines what exactly the client needs, and, together with the product and technology teams, decides whether the product needs improvement and what will be made of this within the CS, and why the product teams will have to be involved.
When evaluating incoming requests, it is important to distinguish whether we are talking about adapting the product to the client’s infrastructure or about additional developments for his specific needs. In the first case, the work is performed within the framework of the original contract. In the second, additional development may be required, which is paid separately. However, such a solution can subsequently become universal – this is how a private client request turns into a new product scenario. Ultimately, the question of what resources will be used for a particular revision is decided individually. But the approach itself is important, when relations with the client are transferred from the logic of product implementation to the logic of its development and achievement of the required result.
6. The final point is not the completion of the implementation. After the customer has achieved the planned result, it is necessary to find out which scenarios can be developed in the future and where there are opportunities for further use of the product.
Here, the CS plays a key role, helping to maintain contact with the client, quickly receive feedback on his experience, identify needs and respond in a timely manner to changes in them.
This simultaneously supports long-term product use and increases recurring revenue.
CS makes product ‘understandable’
For the client, an understandable way from purchasing a product to getting the result is important. It is CS that helps to go through this path – to integrate the solution into existing processes, go through coordination with information security, transfer data, transfer employees to new processes, etc. The success of the project is when the entire client team begins to use the solution in their daily work and does not experience difficulties with this.
The CS approach allows, on the one hand, to standardize the client path so that the quality of work and the result do not depend on a specific person. On the other hand, it makes it possible to maintain flexibility; that is important when working with corporate clients who may have very different processes, scales and requirements.
By Julia Olkhova, Development Director, Customer Success VK Tech