Regardless of your role in the organization (CEO, COO, CRO, CCO and/or VP Customer Success), it is essential to be aligned with... value realisation by the latter. This is your company’s mission, and if done well, it will ensure customer retention and revenue growth – KPIs that Customer Success teams are often measured on.
Customer Success plays a critical role in delivering value, but it is not solely responsible for retention, and will need to collaborate with other parts of your organisation to achieve this mission. It is therefore important to create alignment between your different Business Units. In order to formalise this collaboration more concretely during the life of the client, we use the Value Realisation Framework. It is broken down into 5 phases: Definition, Delivery, Realisation, Validation and Optimisation.
- Value Definition : during the sales process, the value of your software/solution/service is defined, as well as an idea of the ROI (= return on investment) promised by the Sales organisation. It will therefore be necessary to ensure that the definition of value established by the Sales team is transmitted to the Customer Success team.
- Value Delivery: implementation, integration, onboarding, training, change management, coaching, support… so many terms and actions delivered by the CS teams to deliver the previously defined value to your customers. The fluidity of the interactions of these different teams with each other and with your customer will play an essential role in the satisfaction of the latter. It is therefore necessary to establish the roles of each in a clear process!
- Value Realisation: the use of your software/solution/service coupled with the guidance from Customer Success should allow your user to see the impact on their function and begin to realise the value of your solution. Customer Success is strongly involved in this step, without forgetting the close collaboration with your Product teams.
- Value Validation: your users confirm the value received and you go higher in the customer's organisation to obtain the approval of the decision-makers on the value that your solution brings to them and their business. The ROI is reached or even exceeded, the value is validated!
- Value Optimisation: once the value of your solution has been validated, your client may be tempted to go further and seek to unlock even more value. You thus have the opportunity to optimise the value provided to your customers through upsells and/or cross-sells by increasing the use of your services and the impact for your customers... a virtuous circle begins!
Leveraging the Value Realisation Framework, you can then define the roles and responsibilities as well as the expertise necessary, inside your organisation, to ensure that your customers realise value. This framework allows you to clarify the interactions and implement the essential collaborations between Customer Success and your Sales, Marketing, Product and Support teams… throughout the customer journey and maximise retention as well as revenue from your customers. Customer success is driven by your Customer Success team(s), but it is your entire organisation that must be customer-centric and must be in tune in order to deliver the experience and value that your customers expect to achieve their success.
We have implemented the Value Realisation Framework to some of our customers. If you want to know more, contact us.