On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Pat Phelan, Chief Customer Officer at GoCardless about charging for customer success.
Pat’s been involved in SaaS before SaaS was a ‘thing’. Over the past 20+ years, he’s worked his way from being a CSM to CCO and has held multiple leadership roles. He has operated in industries such as Ecomm, HR Tech, Social Media Management, and most recently FinTech in his role as Chief Customer Officer at GoCardless where he oversees the global CS group. Pat is passionate about driving exceptional customer experience as well as building high-performing teams.
In his experience, he has not only built and scaled CS teams globally, but he has also added a monetary value to a CSM and added an “additional charge” for customers to work with customer success. Charging for customer success is a controversial topic for many people, but Pat has a different view on it.
In our discussion, Pat helps answer some important questions about charging for customer success:
- Most companies build success into COGS, but I believe you have had a different experience, can you share what you have experienced in charging for success?
- Some of the biggest SaaS companies (Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe) always charge for some sort of customer service (support, success, professional services) Do you feel that more businesses should charge for success?
- How can business start to charge for success?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- My belief is that I think where customers perceive value and where customers perceive that the addition of a resource is going to get them what they want faster, then I don’t think charging or attributing a cost to that value is something that we should be shying away from
- We have to believe that what we’re providing is valuable enough to at least consider it and charge for it.
- The first question I would ask anybody is if you’re not willing to look at having a cost associated with customer success in any way, then why do you think that it’s not valuable enough that you couldn’t do that?
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!
