Posted 1 day by Jonny Grange
Are you struggling to retain your customers after the sale? Do clients sign up, only to go quiet a few months later? If this sounds familiar, it might be time to take a closer look at your customer success function – or lack of one.
At Digital Waffle, we speak with businesses every day who are feeling the pain of churn but aren’t sure how to fix it. One thing’s becoming clear across sectors: a strong customer success (CS) strategy is no longer optional – it's essential.
In this blog, we’ll explain what customer success is, why it matters, and how it directly impacts your business growth. We’ll also cover the metrics that matter, and why hiring the right people into CS roles can unlock real long-term value.
What is customer success?
Customer success is a proactive approach to helping customers achieve their goals using your product or service.
Customer success is all about making sure your customers get what they came for – value. It’s not the same as customer service. While service is reactive (think answering support tickets), success is proactive. It’s about staying close to the customer, understanding their goals, and helping them reach those goals with your product or service.
The best customer success teams don't wait for a problem to arise. They’re already monitoring usage, checking in, and spotting signs of disengagement early. It’s part education, part consultancy, and part relationship-building.
For subscription or recurring revenue businesses in particular, this role is crucial. It’s the difference between a customer who renews year after year and one who quietly churns after the initial term.
CS professionals are the ones bridging the gap between what your sales team promises and what your customers actually experience.
Why customer success is important?
Here are three key reasons customer success matters, each one showing the impact it can have on retention, growth and reputation.
Improves retention and reduces churn
Retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. You’ve probably heard that before, but it’s worth repeating. Studies consistently show that acquisition costs far outweigh retention costs. Yet many businesses still invest more in sales than in CS.
Customer success is your front line when it comes to retention. A proactive success manager will spot red flags like reduced engagement or a change in stakeholder involvement. These are often early signs that a customer might leave. By stepping in early, they can re-engage the client, reset expectations and often turn things around.
This saves you from scrambling to replace lost revenue or becoming over-reliant on new customer acquisition to meet your targets.
Increases customer lifetime value (CLTV)
When your CS team is performing well, they’re not just stopping customers from leaving. They’re helping them grow. A good success manager will know when a customer is ready to expand. That could mean upgrading their plan, adding new users or taking on additional services.
These moments are easy to miss if the relationship is purely reactive. Customer success professionals build trust over time. That trust opens the door to honest conversations about needs and challenges. It’s those conversations that lead to meaningful upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
The result is increased customer lifetime value. It’s a simple but powerful way to drive revenue from your existing base.
Creates advocates and boosts referrals
Customer success doesn’t just protect revenue. It creates new opportunities by turning happy customers into advocates. Satisfied clients are more likely to recommend you, leave positive reviews and share their experiences with peers. But advocacy doesn’t happen on its own.
A structured customer success function ensures that your clients are not just satisfied, but genuinely successful. That means they’re achieving real results with your product. When customers feel supported, listened to and valued, they are far more likely to recommend you to others.
That kind of word-of-mouth is one of the most effective and low-cost ways to grow your business.
How do you measure customer success
Success needs to be measured. Without the right metrics, it’s hard to know whether your CS function is working or where it needs improvement.
Key customer success metrics
Here are five key metrics every employer should understand when evaluating or building a CS function.
Customer retention rate (CRR)
This tells you how many customers stay with you over a specific period. High retention is a sign that your product is delivering value and that your CS team is keeping clients engaged. To calculate it, take the number of customers at the end of a period, subtract any new customers, then divide by the total number at the start.
Retention is one of the clearest indicators of satisfaction and loyalty. If customers are leaving at a high rate, it’s time to understand why. Your CS team should be leading that analysis.
Net promoter score (NPS)
NPS measures how likely your customers are to recommend you. It’s usually gathered through a simple survey asking: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a colleague or friend?”
Scores range from minus 100 to plus 100. Anything over 50 is generally considered strong. But the real insight comes from tracking this over time and understanding the reasons behind it. A good CS manager will not only collect NPS data but act on it.
Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
CLTV is the total revenue you expect to earn from a customer over their time with your company. It’s a powerful metric because it brings together retention, spend and upsell activity into one number.
Your CS team plays a direct role in increasing CLTV. They do this by reducing churn and by identifying the right moments to help customers expand their use of your product or service.
Churn rate
Churn is the percentage of customers who leave your business over a set period. A high churn rate is often a sign that something is off, whether that’s product fit, onboarding, or engagement after the sale.
Customer success managers are well placed to investigate and act on churn. They can speak to customers who leave, analyse usage patterns and bring those insights back to the wider business.
Expansion revenue
Expansion revenue includes everything a customer spends beyond their original contract. This might be upgrades, add-ons, renewals or cross-sells. A growing rate here shows that customers are getting more value from your product over time.
This is a strong indicator of the return on investment your CS team is delivering. If you’re not measuring expansion revenue, you’re missing a key part of your growth strategy.
How customer success drives business growth
There are several practical ways customer success contributes to business growth. Each one helps protect revenue, improve performance and uncover new opportunities.
It reduces revenue leakage.
When customers quietly leave or downgrade without warning, your revenue takes a hit. This kind of loss is often preventable, but only if someone is paying attention. That’s exactly what a customer success team is there to do.
They stay in regular contact with customers, monitor product usage and spot signs of disengagement early. With the right intervention, a customer who might have left can be brought back on track. That can save your business from a drop in revenue that might have otherwise gone unnoticed until it was too late.
It strengthens your product feedback loop.
Customer success professionals are often the best people to gather feedback from your customer base. They are on the front line, speaking with clients every day, hearing what works, what doesn’t and what’s missing. That insight is vital for improving your offer.
Without a proper feedback loop, your product team is left relying on assumptions or indirect input. CS helps ensure you’re building the right features and fixing the right problems. When that loop is working well, your product becomes more useful and more valuable to the people who use it.
It increases team alignment and focus.
Customer success doesn’t operate in isolation. When it works closely with sales, marketing and product, it brings the whole business into better alignment. CS can help marketing speak the customer’s language. It can share pain points and success stories with sales. And it can give product teams clear, focused feedback on what customers actually want.
That kind of alignment makes your business more focused, more effective and more likely to deliver what customers need.
It unlocks upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
As CS teams build relationships with customers, they get to understand their goals, challenges and future plans. This often uncovers opportunities for expansion. It could be a new feature, an additional service or a more suitable plan.
Because customer success has built trust, they are in a strong position to introduce these conversations. When upselling is done with the customer’s goals in mind, it feels like a helpful recommendation, not a sales pitch.
It creates long-term customer loyalty.
In many industries, switching providers is simple. That’s why customer loyalty matters. A strong customer success function keeps clients engaged, supported and appreciated, making it less likely they’ll consider alternatives.
Customers don’t stay just because your product works. They stay because they feel looked after. By investing in CS, you’re building real relationships. Those relationships help protect your revenue and give you a stronger base to grow from.
Customer success isn’t just about making customers feel good. It’s about making your business perform better. From reducing churn to unlocking new revenue, a well-supported CS function has a direct and measurable impact on your growth.
But building that team takes time, expertise and a deep understanding of what good customer success looks like. If you're struggling to hire the right people, we can help.
At Digital Waffle, we’re a specialist customer success recruitment agency. We know how to spot top CS talent and we’ve built the network to connect them with businesses like yours.
Looking to hire in customer success? Get in touch with us today.
