More than Just Lines on a Map: Best Practices for U.S Bike Routes
What is Customer Success for Good?
1. What is Customer Success for Good?
• Inspiration from 1929
• Defined and Operationalized
• Launching a Tribe using Meetup
• Linking CS and Social Impact
• Salesforce as a Role Model
• Takeaways
3. Definitions
Customer Success (CS), defined, is the relationship between a vendor and its
customers with the goal being to make the customer as successful as possible with the
product so as to increase customer lifetime value. 1
Customer Experience (CX), defined, is the product of an interaction – customer
journey, brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments (digital and
physical) the customer experiences – between an organization and a customer over the
duration of their relationship. 2
Goal: Become the Quarterback who drives customer happiness and success by serving
as the customer conduit with key company functions such as Sales, Marketing, Support and
Product. Execute a playbook by owning customer analytics and delivering a great customer
experience.
Source 1, 2: customer-experience-and-customer-success-converge-1/
5. Why do we need Customer Success for Good?
• Partnering with Customers for a Better world
• Best practices in verticals such as Healthcare
and Education
• Implementing Tech for Good
• Community for change-makers and CS/CX
professionals
Launching a Meetup: Link
6. Linking Customer Success & Social Impact
Becoming the voice of the conscientious customer:
Opportunities abound among customers willing to embrace social change
and buy from progressive companies such as Nike and Patagonia.
Example: Nike’s stock hit an all-time high last month after launching an ad with
Colin Kaepernick. Who would have expected shoe sales to peak besides
Nike’s executives and customer-facing employees? Nike’s customers are predominately
young, liberal-minded individuals -- many of them people of color.
Create a culture of volunteering and making it skills-based:
A social impact division or at least, an employee group, will make it easier to
establish the culture. CS can lead the way @startups.
Example: Accenture’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) employee group
promotes volunteerism and performs skills-based volunteering such as
implementing Salesforce at nonprofits. Accenture also engages customers to
collaborate on community service projects.
7. Social Impact Leader: Salesforce
Establish OKRs for Customer Success and Social Impact:
Make social impact part of Performance Management. CS can lead an initiative to include
individual OKRs related to social impact and volunteering.
Example: Salesforce implemented the 1-1-1 program, which dedicated 1% of Salesforce’s equity,
1% of Salesforce’s product and 1% of Salesforce employees’ time for volunteering. Several tech
companies using Salesforce have signed up for this program including Yelp, Optimizely and
startup clients I work with.
Implementing Tech for Good:
Products can be configured for industry verticals, nonprofits, and the public sector. CS can work
with Product and Sales to champion opportunities for ‘impact’ implementations with strategic
customers. Discount pricing and donations of software licenses can make a huge difference for
nonprofits.
Example: Salesforce provides 10 subscriptions of Lightning Enterprise Edition at no cost for
nonprofits.
8. Get CEO Buy-In so Customer Success can
align with Social Impact
Tone from the Top makes social impact a top priority
9. Takeaways
Join 1–1-1 if you are part of the Salesforce ecosystem
Create a dot.org / launching a division for impact to enable skills-based
services with your product or service. Focus on underserved communities.
Create a vertical that you are passionate about such as Healthcare
or Education. If you have 100 customers you are responsible for,
identify ones which could get a social impact boost by tweaking your
product and launching vertical solutions.
Build a Sangha: Create opportunities for work-life balance and
mindfulness; Activities like group meditation create alignment,
connectedness.
Launch a Meetup if one doesn’t exist yet to bring the company and
customers together. Highlight social impact case studies.