What is the importance of the customer success team?

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Costs of Goods Sold
COGS is a key indicator for summing up all the costs involved in creating, developing, and delivering a product. In short, it is what the company spends to have it ready to sell.

The first way to look at CS is as a part of your product. One of the necessary steps to bring it to light and ensure people will have an optimal experience when buying and using it.

Sales and Marketing
Another way of looking at this is customer success as a guiding force for leads australia cell phone number list in the middle of their customer’s journey.

From this point of view, CS can attract new leads and start ensuring great experiences with the product even before the client buys it. The team can be a great addition to attract, nurture, and seal the deal.

But how exactly do they fit in both departments and what advantages a company can have from each one of these strategies? In the next two topics, we want to go through these discussions in more detail.

But first, we want to be clear about why that choice matters. Being able to correctly position efforts and investments will give managers a better vision of how the team is performing and impacting the profits.

When you use a ROI calculator, for example, you need to know the source of investments and their correlation to assess their actual return.

So it is not just a matter of filling the right fields in a spreadsheet. It is about knowing the real cost of products/services and the real cost of providing great experiences to your audience — from the first contact with the brand to purchase and beyond.

Why associate it with the Cost of Goods Sold?
Putting customer success under the COGS’ tab is a valid way of looking at it but it is more common to see in startups and digital products.

The reason for this is quite compelling: if experiences and brand connection are growing demands from audiences, then CS is an indivisible part of what you are selling.

The Digital era is an era of blurred lines. A product isn’t anymore just itself but what it means, how it feels, and the message it sends.

If this is a kind of pursuit your company is going for, then customer success is definitely a part of COGS. Associating both things will not only help you assess your costs better but also change a little of the company’s mindset when developing the goods to sell.

Think about that. When creating a new solution in this scenario, form, function, and price are not enough to compete for the audience’s attention.

This “one more thing” that makes your products unique is not always palpable. A feeling, a status, a meaning. There is where the CS team becomes crucial for success.

So, if you are looking for that kind of strategy for your goods, the answer is easier. But maybe it isn’t the same for everyone.

Companies that put customer success under COGS will naturally end up with a more expensive product to sell. This can influence pricing and profit margins.

Especially when dealing with investors, it can be tricky talking about higher costs for intangible aspects of a development process.

So you will need to have a great structure to back up this importance and educate how CS is imperative for perceiving greater value in what you sell.