What does "customer success excellence" mean to you?

Jeremy Donaldson

CS Leaders,

If you woke up tomorrow in charge of a CS excellence strategy for your company, what would information, activities, training, processes, technology, and people would you want included? 

How would you define "customer success excellence" today vs. what would you like excellence to look like tomorrow?

Would you benchmark based on internal high performs or an external standard?

I would love to connect with anyone building or having built a CS excellence strategy/center.

Ed Powers

I think a great model to follow is the Baldrige Performance Excellence framework, which has been around since 1988. Begun by an act of Congress, the Baldrige program (https://www.nist.gov/baldrige) recognizes the highest performing organizations in business, healthcare, education, non-profits and government. Its core values: 

• Systems perspective
• Visionary leadership
• Customer-focused excellence
• Valuing people
• Organizational learning and agility
• Focus on success
• Managing for innovation
• Management by fact
• Societal contributions
• Ethics and transparency
• Delivering value and results

Businesses who embrace the Baldrige values and practice continuous improvement routinely outperform the competition by at least 2:1. All of these principles and practices apply to SaaS businesses and Customer Success functions, and Baldrige remains the worldwide gold standard for excellence, in my view.