09/17/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/17/2021 10:04
According to a new IDC report, 'Salesforce is a technology industry gold standard for customer success. Salesforce was a pioneer of the concept and was one of the first businesses in any industry to publicly advocate a goal of customer success.'
Driving the news: In 2018, Salesforce invested in connecting its Sales and Customer Success teams to deliver a unified, end-to-end customer experience. Then, in 2021, the Customer Success Group (CSG) expanded to include both partner organizations (Alliances and Channels) and Ignite - Salesforce's in-house customer innovation and consulting organization.
As a result of this expansion, Salesforce is better able to offer customers of multiple sizes and industries integrated, trusted experts, and high-value services - and drive mutual accountability for customer success.
What's the impact: TheIDC report, 'Customer Success - The Salesforce Approach,'1 focuses on Salesforce's Success 360 methodology, which connects the pre-sale and post-sale experience and delivers value at every step of the customer journey. It includes four steps:
What they're saying:
'Salesforce has succeeded in transforming its customer success operations into a strategic competitive advantage,' said Gerry Brown, research director, IDC European CX. 'Its commitment to customer success is striking. It has connected customer success and sustainable long-term revenue growth that fuels its customer success investment decisions. Other technology vendors would be well advised to follow its example down this route.'
The Salesforce perspective: Customer success should be considered a business model - more than service alone - that can galvanize morale and motivation and direct customer experience (CX) investments to measurable and tangible customer outcomes.
Companies should consider implementing a dedicated CSG team to ensure low customer churn, market share growth within enterprise customer accounts, and long-term loyalty, advocacy, and customer value.
The customer view:
Explore further: For more than 20 years, Salesforce has collected over 150,000 customer product usage best practices, insights, and benchmarks that can help guide customer success. For more information on Salesforce's Success Plans, Professional Services, and how its Customer Success team leverages these best practices and tools to drive amazing results for customers, read IDC's whitepaper here.
1IDC, Customer Success - The Salesforce Approach, (doc #EUR147904421, June 2021)
2IDC did not provide the customer analysis on Priority Health.
3IDC did not provide the customer analysis on Glassdoor.