Results Always Trump Good Intentions In Customer Retention

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To paraphrase a popular maxim, “the road to failure is paved with good intentions.” This lesson is spot-on when it comes to sustaining successful customer relationships in the new subscription economy, where ensuring business outcomes is paramount.


Ensuring business outcomes is fundamentally about sticking around after the sale, paying attention to what creates results, and delivering the programs that yield real business outcomes.

Be present and take stock, early and often. What do the first 90 days look like after the customer purchases or, in the world of IT, goes live with your products? A lot can happen in this crucial period—both good and bad—that can influence whether customers will be successful in using and gaining value from them.

But we can’t stop there. In the subscription economy, many companies don’t realize a profit until their customers renew subscriptions several times over. Therefore, it’s critical to adopt strategies and techniques designed to help ensure customer success—and renewal—for the long haul. Yet while researching for our book Competing for Customers, my coauthors and I found that very few companies are making real strides in ensuring customer success. Many are making incremental progress, but most fall short by failing to adopt a holistic approach that engages customers across functional boundaries and in every part of the customer lifecycle.

Marketing will generate more leads by informing its campaigns with business outcomes and success metrics. Sales teams will see stronger renewal commissions when they become engaged in post-sales product adoption and business results. And product development teams that focus on engineering outcomes, rather than simply more features, will discover new markets and opportunities. Yet few organizations are combining these efforts into a single strategy to advance customer success more completely.

In the subscription economy, professional services and support teams can move to the front lines of ensuring day-to-day customer success and business results, helping to unify the rest of the organization around this objective. Bucking the tradition of playing second fiddle to sales and engineering, these teams can be the new champions of customer success in the quest for better retention and expanded revenue.

Simply stated, ensuring customer success is a team sport, with every part of the organization focused on advancing customer outcomes. This mindset represents a formidable cultural shift for many organizations, but it’s a shift they cannot afford to ignore if they aspire to long-term success in the new subscription economy.

To learn more about ensuring customer success in the subscription economy, visit the Competing for Customers website.

Jeb Dasteel is Oracle’s chief customer officer.

Jeb holds the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer at Oracle. He is responsible for driving customer-focus into all aspects of the Oracle busines...