What is Composable Customer Success and Why is it Important for Your Business?

If you have a child that loves to play with LEGOs, then you probably know that one of the greatest things about these little interconnecting blocks is that one set can be used to make dozens of different models. For instance, you may purchase a set that comes with instructions for building a pirate ship, but halfway through building the ship, your child changes his mind and decides he wants to build a fire truck instead – no problem! He simply reassembles the blocks into what he wants the final product to be, no matter what the original instructions said.   

This idea of using building blocks interchangeably to create a different end result is the basis for business composability. Essentially, composability is the practice of architecting a business using modular, interchangeable pieces that allow for quick pivots and the ability to reimagine how the different parts and pieces can fit together. In recent years, particularly through the uncertainty of the pandemic, composability has become a key feature of successful, value-driven businesses and has woven its way through many different organizational functions. At Totango, we want to highlight the importance of composability for customer success. 

Composable customer success is key to operationalizing your team to scale without friction, providing value to your customers from day one, and quickly shifting to meet new needs and support new opportunities. Let’s take a deeper look at what composable customer success is and how it can help your business succeed.   

What is Composable Customer Success?

Composable customer success uses uniform, reusable building blocks with specific pre-built capabilities to create and deliver optimal experiences and outcomes for customers. These building blocks make up the steps of your customer journey, and, similar to the LEGOs in a set, can be easily rearranged or redesigned to create a different experience or end result that better fits with your customer’s needs.

Totango is leading the shift to composable customer success by delivering the industry’s only modular customer success platform. With tools like our modular SuccessBLOCs that feature pre-built tools and templates for every stage of the customer journey and our Customer Experience Canvas, which allows you to design, run, measure and iterate your entire journey from one place, we’ve made composable customer success incredibly easy. 

Take, for example, Totango’s Manage Onboarding Projects SuccessBLOC. This module comes out-of-the-box with all of the goals and KPIs, segmentation capabilities, workflows, and campaign automations you need to create a successful and efficient onboarding experience. However, perhaps after you’ve been using your current onboarding process for a while, your company adds a new feature to your product so you need to add in some new training materials or training sessions to your process. Rather than having to start from scratch and completely redesign your workflow, the Onboarding SuccessBLOC allows you to create space for this new addition by simply rearranging a few “blocks” in your Canvas to fit these new steps. From there, you simply have to hit “Play” for the new process to go into effect seamlessly. There’s no gap in service to your customers, you don’t need IT to come in and reprogram anything, and everyone on your team has visibility to the changes that were made.

Composable Customer Success Requirements

There are six key requirements for an effective composable customer success platform, including: 

1. The ability to mix and match CS programs using modular building blocks to create modern experiences and workflows.
2. Having a unified system that allows you to design, build, run and measure your entire customer journey lifecycle from one place.
3. Having a multi-dimensional customer view that allows for unified visibility into each customer from all of your data sources.
4. The ability to focus on the outcome first and get started instantly without having all of the answers, then iterate and recalibrate as needed to see instant results as well as long-term wins.
5. Having a library of CS best practices and experiences to reference and use when needed.
6. Having friction-free, shared participation across the organization that empowers everyone to deliver outcomes and break down silos.

While this list may seem exhaustive, fortunately, Totango is here to help. Our modular customer success platform is purpose-built for composable customer success. And unlike other approaches to CS that are built around siloed functions, require heavy IT customization and can’t handle the scale of recurring revenue businesses, Totango is simple to get started and allows you to realize outcomes quickly.

Want to see what composable customer success can do for your business? Sign up for Totango for free today to stop getting caught in scale-up chokepoints and start seeing recurring revenue growth.