60% of Customer Success Teams Are Unaware of Critical Client Issues

Sudipto Ghosh

January 30, 2018

Survey from Bolstra Identifies Disparate Data, Underutilized Technology Among Customer Success Teams

Bolstra, an agile customer success platform for subscription service companies, today announces the results of a recent survey, “2018 Customer Success Team Maturity”. The survey includes findings from a sample of customer success teams across industries about their current states. Most notably, of customer success teams surveyed, more than 60 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t know about a critical customer issue until days after it happened, a customer brings it to their attention, or until the customer canceled.

At the time of this announcement, Bolstra CEO, Haresh Gangwani, said, “We set out to have a better understanding of the state of customer success teams among enterprise organizations.”

How Mature is Your Customer Success Team

Customer Success Maturity can be measured across 5 areas —

Skill
Process
Data
Technology
Organization

Customer Sucsess Maturity Infographic, Bolstra — *Customer Success Maturity Infographic, Bolstra*

Haresh added, “What we found is a disparity across organizations in customer success strategy: underutilized technology, lack of proactive strategy, lack of experience, and inaccurate and decentralized data. We believe that 2018 will be the year of adoption for customer success teams. Once enterprises have organizational alignment and well-defined processes for customer success, technology can be implemented to solve the frustrating issues we found to be so common in our survey.”

Key findings from the survey include–

– Customer and account information is not stored in one central location. Over 70 percent of respondents use four or more disparate sources of customer/account data.

– 70 percent of respondents do not feel as though their customer success team is optimally established with 75 percent of respondents reporting not fully adopting the CS solution in which they’ve invested, still using significant internal workarounds to accomplish their goals.

– While just over 50 percent of teams label themselves as established, 80 percent of teams had less than an average of six years of experience.

– 70 percent of respondents still perceive customer success teams as reactive to customer inquiries.

Currently, Bolstra, as a Customer Success Management Solution, offers solutions to B2B companies to prescriptively manage their customers in real time.