Leading Customer Success: Dharmesh Acharya, COO, Radixweb, on Driving Organizational Growth

Quick Summary: Customer Success is emerging as ‘the’ buzz word for the global tech landscape. Our COO, Mr. Dharmesh Acharya, in this elaborate article, explains how Radixweb is pushing top-tier growth and beyond with customer success excellence.

Ask a budding business leader about their first priority when it comes to achieving rapid growth and they’ll talk about new client acquisition. However, a few seasoned ones who have survived withering market disruptions will unanimously tell you about the importance of client retention.

I have seen a multitude of new age business leaders call out the focus on client retention as old school. However, understand this, while new client retention is a clear metric for revenue growth, client retention is a very subtle, but critical driver of growth.

Let me further explain the crucial impact of customer success on IT businesses. To acquire a new customer, we invest a certain time and budget. However, it is possible that we lose the complete revenue potential of a customer if they churn off earlier than expected. This is where your ‘old school’ thought progresses – they attempt to reduce the impact of this churn. And this is why businesses with a strong focus on customer success grow faster than businesses razor-focussed on client acquisition.

While there is a strong business potential when it comes focusing on client success, at Radixweb, we let ourselves be governed with a very different thought school. Because for the past 25 years, we have looked at our clients as more than financial transactions – treated their business vision as individual brand journeys and crafted tailored software solutions that brought tangible results to their processes.

Re-defining The Key Metrics of Growth for Ourselves

Warren Buffet, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway once said, “Your customer is going to vote and talk. You want them out there as salesmen for you.”

Since early 2000, Radixweb has been growing and scaling with this thought. Yes, financial gains are a part and parcel of our business. But over a span closer to three decades, we have transitioned our focus to customer delight over customer satisfaction.

I believe at Radixweb, our biggest wins lie in our transition from being outsourcing software development providers to now, as equal equity partners in tech innovation for our clients. Designing brilliant customer journeys through our prowess in emerging technology has been our primal focus since our inception in 2000.

In the process of redefining customer success for our external stakeholders, we have successfully rediscovered the metrics of true success for ourselves – as their partners of growth. Now, we know calling ourselves ‘partners of growth’ is a big statement, and we live by it. Our aim as a globally leading custom software development company is to be disruption ready for our clients – that’s what we call being truly customer-focused.

Through our qualitative processes and company-wide upskilling drives, we now boast of a 50% certified workforce that is trained in relevant industry-approved skills. Our larger goal with these upskilling drives is to contribute to two things – a sustainable tech force that innovates at speed, caters to rapid and unique requirements of our clients and in another way, gives back to the global tech community durable assets of technology that can disrupt, reshape and rebuild multiple industries at large.

Tailoring a High-performing Customer Success Organization

Just like every business, we at Radixweb, aim at being top quartile performers too. However, we have a more human approach to this. We have dedicated ourselves to design customer success models that fit our customers’ needs. Since 2000, Radixweb has thoroughly invested in being more efficient in addressing the core needs of our customers.

And over the years, we have translated this with the help of best-practice in digital support to build software products that seamlessly fit into our clients' existing systems – reducing the hassle of outdoing their entire systems. I have observed that this practice has miraculously reduced the headcount spend when it comes to the customer-success function. Thereby enabling us to balance tech innovation with sustainable spending.

Alternatively, at Radixweb, we also believe in shaping our experts as customer-success professionals to fit better into the expectation of enterprise level clients and organizations. Our approach to designing a customer success model is therefore both a digital and a hands-on model which seamlessly serves any size of clients that we are serving.

Measuring Customer Success with Customer Feedback

While a lot of our peers rely on real-time data insights to measure customer success, our approach is a slight shift from the trend. Let me explain, most advanced businesses harp on lagging indicators (renewals & expansion) and activity indicators leading indicators (adoption of solutions, net promoter score, features used) as scorecards of customer success.

However, we hold on strongly to Activity Indicators like a client’s willingness and frequency to take part in surveys, feedback, interviews etc. as our client success metrics. Let’s give you our most recent success story in this regard –

A Win We Didn’t Expect to be This Massive –

We have recently bagged the Power Partner of the Year Award by INC. Business Media. Although we knew we qualified for the award in every aspect, there’s something that left us overwhelmed.

As a part of their judgement procedure, INC. Business Media reached out to a bunch of our clients across several global locations. In this exercise, our clients actively narrated how they are constantly scaling, meeting business needs and tapping into unexplored possibilities backed by our tech prowess.

This assessment drive by INC. gave us further insights on how aligned we are on our CX journey, helping our clients push the traditional boundaries of their businesses with the power of technology. In our closer to three-decade old journey as a software development company, we aim to build seamless user journeys through stupendous partnership excellence and collaborative spirit for delivering 360-degree value through tech investments.

Making Customer Success The ‘Learning Engine’

Here, at Radixweb, our customer success stories do not fill up our showcase files (read our success stories). They serve as our crucial driver of growth across the organization. Imagine the wealth of insights we have accumulated from Customer Xcellence mega drive where our clients have wholeheartedly poured out their suggestions to our teams. A drive which we launched only six months back, asking our clients to fill in feedback surveys, has looped back enormous deconstructive feedback from our partners – all for qualitative upgradation across our teams.

The survey findings through our feedback mechanism are serving as an enormous learning engine – as we have passed down our client’s suggestions and expectations across the sales, product, and marketing teams to allow our software products and services to flourish and improve.

Our relentless commitment to customer success is in all ways, complimenting the efforts of our sales and customer success teams, while pushing our revenue models to a higher gear every quarter. However, to us at Radixweb, it is not just about accelerated revenue growth, it is more about emerging as the go-to problem solver for each of our clients.