Charging for Customer Success

To charge for customer success or not to charge is the question many SaaS companies are currently asking themselves. It can be tricky to know whether or not it should be a part of the cost of goods sold or if it should be charged for as a premium service. So, how can companies start to charge for success? And what are some metrics CS leaders should track if they do?

In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats 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 build 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.

“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.”

Whether or not you decide to charge for the customer success service, it’s all about the value generated for the customer.

“The first question I would ask anybody is if you're not willing to look at having a cost associated to customer success in any way, then why do you think that it's not valuable enough that you couldn't do that? And there will be lots of reasons, for example deal sizes or market appetite. I get all of that, but at the same time, we have to believe that what we're providing is valuable enough to at least consider it.”

Listen now to the full conversation with Pat and Anika to learn more about charging for customer success.