Customer Success and the Transformation of Customer Relationships

The construct of “customer satisfaction” has been used for several decades in marketing to achieve outcomes such as customer loyalty, word-of-mouth communication, resistance to competition, and customer equity. Recent research, however, has indicated little to no correlation between customer satisfaction and many of these outcomes. A more recent marketing construct is “customer delight,” where affective bonds and positive associations are the foundations for customer relationships. While customer delight has numerous advantages, an important limitation is that it can only be used with certain types of products and consumption situations.
This study introduces the academic construct of “customer success,” an objective tool that could redefine customer relationships, and define it as an objective and mathematically based strategic process to maximize customer-desired outcomes. A long-term customer success strategy is customer-driven and designed to be mutually beneficial to both an organization and its customers. While the construct of customer success has been sporadically used by practitioners in the past, the use of the term has often been arbitrary, and the construct has never been precisely defined.
First, drawing on the reverse logic framework (RLF) of relationship marketing, the customer valuation model, and return on relationships (ROR), this study will use Hunt’s indigenous theory, inductive realist approach to help build the initial theoretical framework for the construct of customer success. Then, this study uses this construct in a government-to-customer (G2C) market scenario to test a series of hypotheses to evaluate government-achieved customer success for COVID-19 pandemic response outcomes. This study will conclude with theoretical and managerial research contributions and provide directions for future research.