In UserIQ’s first annual State of Customer Success and Trends for 2017 survey, we uncovered a wealth of valuable information and feedback from customer success leaders across small and large B2B SaaS organizations in a variety of industries.

The purpose of our inaugural survey and accompanying trend report is to evaluate these objectives and obstacles to suggest paths for growth, issues to avoid, and the state of Customer Success as an industry. Our survey was answered by individuals at companies that ranged in size from less than 50 people to well over 1,000. Respondents came from a range of industries (education, hospitality, media and more) though a pronounced majority work in software.

Check out the highlights in the Customer Success Trends for 2017 SlideShare below. For more, download the full Customer Success 2017 Trend Report.

In the SlideShare, we highlight the current trends suggested from the survey:

1. Cross-department alignment (especially with marketing and sales teams) will be key to improving product adoption and the overall customer journey.
2. Better user intelligence will be important in the coming year as teams aim to understand customer health, minimize churn, and develop more proactive initiatives.
3. Retention and expansion initiatives will be largely dependent on whether or not CS teams can scale effectively through technologies and process over increases in headcount.
4. Client referrals and advocacy are being under-prioritized, because teams have yet to make a clear shift from playing a reactive support role to playing a more proactive part in customer engagement.
5. A more efficient technology stack will be key to helping teams understand, scale, and improve their relationships with key accounts and move toward initiatives focused on growing their customers in the years to come.

A few key points:

• 61% of customer success teams are giving sales/marketing alignment top priority so they can drive higher adoption
• 55% say visibility into customer health and user behavior is their biggest challenge to customer retention
• 20% of respondents indicate that scaling is their biggest overall challenge, a critical step to allocating resources toward account expansion
• 40% denote identifying promoters as a top challenge to turning customers into advocacy, expressing that reactive processes leave them unable to prioritize this lead-driving stage in the customer journey