Customer Success: An Interorganizational Performance Concept in Business Markets

Driven by fast-paced digital transformation, business-to-business firms increasingly identify customer success (CS) management as a relevant business function. The rapid adoption of CS practices triggered a growing body of academic research on CS. Yet questions about the nature, relevance, and contribution of this concept to marketing theory and practice persist: Is CS just another customer mindset metric, or is it a substantively new and important concept that broadens relationship marketing theory? Employing a theories-in-use approach, this research identifies CS as an interorganizational performance concept that comprises three salient dimensions: the degree, the congruence, and the visibility of a customer’s goal achievement. Goal framing, or customers’ and suppliers’ collaborative efforts to identify and operationalize the goals customers seek by using suppliers’ market offerings, emerges as a unique antecedent of CS. Integrating CS into the marketing–performance outcome chain sheds new light on value co-creation across organizational boundaries in business markets.