Founder and editor-in-chief
Writes about Customer Success in companies with many customers – and about how customer work connects to business results.
Jakob Jølstad is the founder and editor-in-chief of CustomerSuccess.no. In his day job he is Head of Customer Success at Dintero.
Jakob has experience from Customer Support, onboarding, customer operations, digital customer journeys, process improvement, customer retention, automation and commercial Customer Success. His background is in technology, payments and digital services.
He has particular hands-on experience with Customer Success in companies serving many small and medium-sized customers. There, the challenges differ from traditional models with dedicated account owners: proactive customer contact has to scale, avoidable friction has to be found and removed, onboarding has to work without personal follow-up, and unnecessary enquiries and churn have to be prevented systematically. A recurring theme is how operational improvements connect to commercial results.
As editor-in-chief, Jakob is responsible for everything published on CustomerSuccess.no, for the use of sources and for correcting errors. The publication is currently run by him alone.
CustomerSuccess.no is Jakob's personal, independent initiative. It does not represent Dintero, and the content is not based on confidential information, internal figures or customer data from any employer. Examples in the articles are generalised or hypothetical.
Logo churn counts the customers who leave. Revenue churn and revenue contraction show the value that disappears from the customers who stay. On GRR, NRR, transaction-based revenue and how Customer Success can spot falling revenue in time.
In ongoing and transaction-based customer relationships, a customer may have left long before anyone records churn. How to build a process to find, investigate and handle the customers who simply stop using the service.
When Customer Success succeeds, nothing happens – and what does not happen cannot be counted. On the counterfactual problem, why it makes prevention invisible, and how the effect can still be estimated.
When the customer base and revenue grow every month, the simple churn percentage gives a misleading picture. On choosing the denominator, weighting by time and revenue, cohorts and why new customers pull the average up.
Not every company needs a Customer Success department. On the characteristics that make the discipline important, a simple decision path, and when the right answer is a better product or better onboarding instead.
From Customer Success Specialist to VP Customer Success: what the roles typically involve, how they differ, and why the same title can mean very different things.
The subscription model moved revenue from the sale to the whole customer relationship – and exposed gaps no function covered. On the background to Customer Success and the problems the discipline was established to solve.
When customers are many and small, you cannot give everyone their own account owner. On segmentation, digital customer journeys, behavioural signals, friction and prioritisation in scaled Customer Success.
Strategy, operating model, segmentation, retention, data and leadership: a review of what a Customer Success leader is responsible for – and why the role varies so much.
GRR, NRR, churn, adoption, customer health and unnecessary enquiries: a practical review of how Customer Success can be measured – and why attribution is harder than it looks.
Customer Support and Customer Success overlap, but have different missions, goals and responsibilities. A nuanced review of the differences, the collaboration and why job titles can mislead.
A thorough introduction to Customer Success: what the discipline is about, why it emerged, how it creates value for customers and companies, and why it is organised so differently.