Published on the 08/12/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Kaseya’s new CCO stops by in Australia and New Zealand; ‘as a service’ mobility means increased focus on customers…
Just recently we had a chat with SAP’s APAC CCO, discovering that his position was pretty brand new. Now, IT service management software vendor Kaseya has made a similar appointment, with Alex Cuevas taking up the newly created role some four months ago. Based in New York and Miami, Cuevas stopped in at iStart on his whistle stop tour to the Antipodes.
Asked what the problem was that led to the creation of his role, Cuevas is up front. “We’ve changed account management – a term everyone is familiar with – to customer success management,” he said.
And account managers become customer success managers (CSM), too.
If that sounds like ‘just a name change’, well, to an extent it is. But there is some psychology behind it, as Cuevas makes clear. “Think about ‘account management’, the term. That isn’t about making a customer happy or about delivering value, it is about getting money out of the client. It’s managing the return. We’ve changed that. Our engagements have to be about helping customers to get value out of what they have bought from us. When the CSM does that, it’s a win win and we’ll sell more software as your organisation will sell more services.”
Reporting directly to recently appointed new CEO Fred Voccola, Cuevas said he is ‘getting into the weeds’ to understand more about the service provider market in Australia and New Zealand.
Asked if he believes the concept, position and title of CCO is an emerging trend, he assented. “Here’s the thing, you can change labels and names and titles, but the purpose of any organisation is to make customers successful. That has to be the core. Maybe the title is becoming trendy and it probably started with Salesforce.com in Silicon Valley as a response to the need to drive up the focus on customer success because businesses have to be more sass with renewals that come up monthly or yearly.”
In other words, the ‘as a service’ model means customers are more mobile; they have the flexibility to change and move if there is a perception that the spend doesn’t justify the return. “The cloud stuff is driving it,” agreed Cuevas. “While ‘great relationships’ and ‘happy customers’ are great, they are not the same thing as value. Value has to be at the root of the relationship and all else follows.”
Just how his own performance is measured comes down, said Cuevas, to “Things like health scores with objective and subjective measures, usage reports, Net Promotor Scores. Essentially, if customers are healthy, then churn numbers will be low. If I’m failing, we’ll see people leaving.”
