"Now we need to be focused on the state of the customer"

"In the Age of the Product, customer service ensured that the product lived up to its specifications. Everything after that was the customer’s responsibility, not the vendor’s. In the Age of the Customer, the bar has been raised. Now it is the outcome that must live up to the customer’s expectations, else it is the vendor who is left holding the bag.
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First of all, we still need customer service. Products still break, implementations still go awry, and parts still wear out, and they all need to be attended to. The traditional CRM customer service model is admirably suited to the task. It is organized around a trouble ticket generating a case which is managed through to a resolution with the data captured in a knowledge base to better inform the next case.
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What this system does not measure well is the customer side of the equation. In a B2C world we call this the customer experience. In a B2B world, the critical variable is the customer outcome. In both cases it is the reason the customer bought the product in the first place. The problem with this variable is that it is, well, so variable. Experiences and outcomes are in the eye of the beholder, and there can be as many as you have beholders—even more if some of your customer tend toward schizophrenia as they so often seem to do.
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The point is, in the past we were focused on the state of the product. Now we need to be focused on the state of the customer. That means there is market both for programs that can help change state and for systems that can help maintain state."

Trechos retirados de "From Customer Service to Customer Success: Taking the Next Step"