How GoCardless monetized customer success

This article is based on a presentation given by Hamish at our Customer Success Festival, Amsterdam in 2024.

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In recent years, customer success has shifted from a supportive function to a key driver of business growth and profitability. There’s an unfair view of CS as a hand-holding function that gets a client from A to B; that kind of passivity just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.

As competition intensifies and customer expectations continue to rise, it’s no longer enough to simply deliver a product or service; businesses must build relationships that drive sustained value and demonstrate impact at every stage of the customer journey.

However, the idea of monetizing customer success can often feel uncomfortable. There's a fear of appearing mercenary or transactional, putting a price tag on what should be a collaborative partnership.

But the reality is that monetizing customer success is often in the best interest of the client. It allows businesses to provide a truly tailored, concierge-level experience, rather than a generic "spray and pray" approach.

As I’ve led the customer success team at GoCardless, I’ve seen how monetizing customer success can transform it from a cost center into a significant revenue stream. Gone are the days of customer success being viewed as a necessary evil – at GoCardless, it's an integral part of our business model that delivers immense value to our clients.

In this article, I’ll explore:

The structure of our customer success packages and what makes them valuable
The journey of turning customer success into a revenue line
Key metrics we track to ensure sustainable growth and impact
The critical importance of aligning sales and customer success teams
Lessons learned and best practices for integrating customer success into the core of the business

Introduction to GoCardless and our mission

GoCardless is in the business of bank-to-bank payments, a system that skips traditional credit card networks. As our name suggests, we’re “cardless,” focusing solely on direct account-to-account transactions.

While we’re not a consumer-facing brand like PayPal, we’re building a global network that allows businesses to make and receive payments across borders seamlessly, with reduced costs and greater efficiency.

Our mission is to free individuals and businesses from the constraints and costs of outdated payment methods like cash, checks, and credit cards. Bank-to-bank transactions are our future – and we’re confident they’re the future of payments as well.

GoCardless was founded in 2011 and now serves over 100,000 customers in 30 markets, including Europe, the UK, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Some of our customers are also our partners, especially those in accounting and CRM software, which helps us extend our reach and offerings.

Creating value at every stage of the journey

In customer success, our team’s purpose is simple: make it easy for customers to get value from each stage of their journey with our product, GoCardless. This aligns with many companies’ customer success promises, but at GoCardless, we’ve taken it a step further by monetizing this promise.

We’ve developed success packages that don’t just support customer retention but also drive revenue.

Our customer promise is about delivering value consistently, ensuring that each stage in the customer lifecycle provides benefits and insights. This goal underpins our approach to success packages, which I’ll explore further in the next section.

These packages have enabled us to put a monetary value on customer success, adding another dimension to the value we provide to our customers.

In the following sections, I’ll break down how we built and monetized these success packages, turning a traditionally supportive function into a strategic revenue driver.

Building an ecosystem for customer success

Our customer success packages are designed as an ecosystem that places the customer at the very center of our operations. These packages are built on the pillars of trust, inspiration, and advocacy, aiming to offer a comprehensive service that supports our customers throughout their entire journey – not just as a one-time engagement.

Many companies charge one-off implementation fees, or they offer standalone Customer Success Managers (CSMs) or occasional services like training and support enhancements through different service level agreements (SLAs).

While these approaches are valuable, we found that bundling these services together to provide a cohesive, in-life experience adds a much deeper level of value for our customers. So, we created packages that bring these essential services into a unified offering.

The structure of our customer success packages

Our success packages include several critical components, each playing a distinct role in the customer experience:

Professional services – Our implementation team is there from day one, helping customers get set up quickly and effectively.
Customer success – This team engages with customers at every stage, acting as their advocate and guide, consulting on product usage, and focusing on retention and growth.
Customer support – Available when customers need direct assistance, our support team is always accessible and equipped to address immediate concerns.
Platform access – Ensuring that customers have the right access to the necessary platform features when they need them.

With these components identified, we then created a tiered approach, offering various levels of service based on customer needs and the complexity of their requirements.

The tiers of service

Our packages are structured into four levels, each tailored to meet different scales of customer needs and provide progressively more personalized service:

Basic: This package is available to all of our self-serve customers as a standard offering. It includes basic support access through our website and standard support hours.
Essential: Designed for customers in our scale segment, the Essential package provides a more proactive, digital-first experience. The team here operates on a ratio of roughly one CSM to 500 customers, which we’re optimizing toward a one-to-1000 ratio. Through this package, we aim to move larger self-serve customers into a more managed environment, with proactive guidance and insights based on intent signals.
Enhanced: This package steps up the level of personalized support with a one-to-few approach, typically at a one-to-40 customer ratio. Enhanced customers receive more proactive support, improved SLAs, and access to implementation services, which allows them to quickly address their evolving needs.
Premium: At the top of the spectrum, our Premium package offers what we call “conceirge” service. This includes a high-touch approach with a 1-to-10 (or 1:15 for less complex cases) CSM ratio. Premium customers enjoy exclusive services such as invitations to customer events and personalized interactions that make them feel like our VIPs.

Monetizing the packages

These three tiers – Essential, Enhanced, and Premium – are paid offerings, with costs varying significantly based on the complexity of the customer’s needs.

Our sales team uses these packages as a framework to assess prospects and current customers, helping to determine the best fit based on their unique needs and organizational complexity. This approach not only aligns our offerings with customer expectations but also ensures our customers receive the right level of support to maximize their success with GoCardless.

The journey to monetizing customer success at GoCardless

Now that you’re familiar with what’s included in our customer success packages, let’s dive into the journey of transforming this concept into a monetized, revenue-generating line for GoCardless.

This “customer monetization journey” has been full of learning, challenges, and a few surprises, which ultimately brought us to where we are today.

Starting small: early stages of customer success

Our journey began in 2016, with the hiring of our very first CSM. Like many companies just beginning to explore customer success, this was initially a one-person role focused primarily on onboarding.

Soon, we realized we needed more than a CSM – we needed implementation services to support customers from the beginning of their journey. Initially, these services operated within our sales team, with support in a separate operations team, creating some silos that limited cohesion.

In 2019, when I joined alongside our Chief Customer Officer, we took a step toward unification. For the first time, we mapped out a connected customer journey and integrated our customer success, support, and implementation teams. It took time, but this milestone set the foundation for what would become our monetized customer success function.

Testing the waters with a free customer success package

By March 2020, we launched a free customer success package, allowing us to introduce different levels of service to our customers. This pilot period was instrumental in helping us understand what customers valued most.

We experimented with SLAs, consultation services, and even events (despite the challenges of 2020) to pinpoint where the real value lay. We discovered that customers valued a blend of proactive support, consultation, and guaranteed response times, giving us the insights to start shaping paid packages.

The first sale (and a major milestone)

In March 2021, we sold our very first package, which was both a surprise and a challenge. Our North American VP of Sales called with news of a $45,000 sale and asked us what we planned to do about it.

Thankfully, we were prepared, and within the same month, we rolled out the package on a broader scale. By June, we had achieved $2 million in sales—a pivotal milestone that validated our approach and demonstrated the potential for monetizing customer success.

Scaling with new offerings and digital tools

As we gained traction, we introduced the Essential package in May 2022. Initially, we were concerned about how customers would perceive a primarily digital service.

However, customers found significant value in knowing that support was accessible, even digitally, and at a fair price point. This offering provided the reassurance and reliability they wanted, further underscoring the demand for these structured, paid success packages.

To support this scaling effort, we invested in customer success tooling by implementing the program, ChurnZero. This platform has been essential in enabling us to manage and personalize the Essential service at scale.

Currently, our Essential CSM-to-customer ratio is one to 500, and with the right tooling, we’re working towards a 1:1000 ratio. This scalability also allows us to extend digital services into our higher-tier Premium and Enhanced packages, adding more personalized touches for our high-value customers.

Positioning the package as a platform fee

One of our most impactful shifts came in 2019 when we repositioned the success package as a “platform fee” rather than a “support” or “success package.”

We observed that customers in the payments industry, especially those more familiar with transaction-based services like PayPal, were more comfortable with the idea of a platform fee.

Interestingly, it was down to a relatively simple shift in terminology that helped our sales team secure buy-in more effectively, as our prospects could more easily grasp the value being provided. This shift reinforced the concept of our success package as an integral part of the GoCardless experience, not just the cherry on top of the cake.

How monetization of customer success has effected GoCardless today

Since our monetization project started, we’ve seen our customer success offering evolve into our second-largest revenue stream, contributing between 10-15% of our total revenue.

To put it into perspective, payments are the core of what GoCardless does—it’s our primary business function. Yet, our success packages have grown to be the second most significant product in our portfolio, underscoring the substantial value of a well-developed, monetized customer success strategy.

This journey, from a single CSM to a fully integrated, revenue-generating customer success ecosystem, has shown us that customer success is more than a support function. By positioning it as a true value-add, we’ve turned it into a powerful contributor to our growth and a pillar of our customer-centric mission.

Results and impact of monetizing customer success

With our customer success packages now firmly established as a core revenue line, I’d like to share some insights on the results and impact of this journey.

While I can’t share exact numbers, I’ll walk you through the high-level trends and what they’ve meant for us as an organization. These results reflect our current financial year, which runs from July to June, so we're looking at a partial-year view.

Exceeding targets and boosting bookings

Each year, we set ambitious targets around customer success bookings, aiming to drive sales of our success packages. Currently, we’re tracking at 162% of our target year-to-date, which demonstrates significant success in this area.

These bookings capture the full contract value, often over a multi-year period—typically three years or more. This provides us with a long-term view of future revenue and allows us to better forecast the impact of customer success on our business growth.

Revenue recognition and future growth

In terms of revenue, we recognize it monthly based on actual usage, meaning that some of our bookings represent future revenue rather than immediate income. This year, we’re currently at 111% of our target for recognized revenue.

While this percentage is lower than our bookings, it highlights a solid stream of expected revenue that will continue to strengthen as customers engage with their packages over time.

Managing costs and driving profitability

One of the most significant areas we’ve focused on is cost management. In the startup and scale-up world, profitability is a critical metric, and achieving it requires careful control of spending.

I’m pleased to say we’ve managed to keep our costs well below the expected spend, transforming customer success from a traditional cost center into a net profit contributor. This achievement has also enabled us to exceed our EBITDA targets, reinforcing the profitability of our customer success function.

Gaining influence within the business

Transforming customer success into a profitable line of business has fundamentally changed its role within GoCardless. While many organizations still view customer success and support teams as cost centers, we’ve demonstrated that this function can actively contribute to profitability. This shift has earned our team a stronger “seat at the table,” influencing strategic decisions across product development, business strategy, and overall decision-making.

By proving the financial value of customer success, we’ve established our function as a crucial part of the company’s growth and success. This journey showcases not only the impact of monetizing customer success but also the shift in perception and influence that comes with being a profit-driving team.

Expanding our customer success base and increasing adoption

Beyond revenue and profitability, we’re tracking additional metrics to ensure our customer success packages deliver sustained value.

One key area we’re focusing on is the percentage of our managed, or sales-served, customer base that is currently paying for these packages. Right now, 83% of our managed customers are on a success package, and our target is to reach 95%.

The gap we’re seeing is primarily due to long-standing customers who are gradually transitioning onto these packages or those we choose not to charge for strategic reasons. There will always be highly strategic customers for whom we offer these packages at no cost because the long-term value they bring to our business far outweighs the direct revenue.

Balancing high expectations with customer satisfaction

Coming from a customer experience background, I know that when customers pay for a service, they expect a higher standard.

Our commitment to delivering value means that our success packages need to exceed these raised expectations. Meeting or exceeding these expectations has been central to maintaining strong customer satisfaction scores.

I’m proud to share that our Net Promoter Score (NPS) has risen significantly. Our most recent NPS survey reflected a 15-point increase over the previous year—a testament to the quality of service we’re delivering through these packages. This increase not only reflects our team’s efforts but also underscores the value customers are experiencing.

Retention and navigating challenges

In terms of retention, our bookings retention rate for success packages currently stands at 89%. While our overall customer retention is higher, this package-specific figure provides valuable insights. There are a couple of factors impacting this rate that we’re actively addressing.

First, economic challenges in the UK, our largest market, have affected some of our customers—especially those in the energy sector, where recent economic instability has led to insolvencies. Unfortunately, when these businesses go under, we lose both revenue and future bookings, contributing to churn in our success packages.

Another factor involves early positioning. In the beginning, some of our sales team members were positioning these packages as implementation-only services, leading to challenges during renewals.

Many customers found it difficult to justify renewing a package that they saw as primarily geared toward onboarding. While we’ve been able to retain some of these accounts at a lower rate, this early misalignment highlighted the importance of clear communication around the comprehensive value of our success packages.

Moving forward

These metrics remind us of both our progress and the areas where there’s room to grow. As we refine our approach, we’re committed to continuing to raise the bar for customer success at GoCardless—ensuring that we not only meet but exceed our customers’ expectations while maintaining strong retention and adoption rates.

Key learnings from monetizing customer success

To wrap up, I want to share some key takeaways from our journey to monetizing customer success at GoCardless.

1. Make success packages attractive to sales

One of the first and most crucial steps is to ensure that success packages are as valuable to sales as our core offerings.

At GoCardless, bookings for Success Packages are treated equally to bookings for payments. This alignment in targets and compensation drives the right behaviors, ensuring that sales and customer success (CS) are united in delivering and promoting value to our customers.

It’s critical to avoid any sense of “second-class citizen” status for these packages to foster buy-in and engagement from sales.

2. Foster alignment between sales and CS

Aligning sales and CS is essential for long-term success. Our sales team needs to understand exactly what our packages deliver, so they can communicate effectively with prospects and avoid misaligned expectations. This alignment requires a continuous feedback loop where insights from prospects feed back to CS, and vice versa, ensuring that the package offerings meet market needs and customer demands.

3. Build an ecosystem for consistent revenue

Our approach to success packages is holistic; rather than offering standalone services, we’ve built an ecosystem that generates stable, long-term revenue.

For a payments business like ours, which recognizes revenue based on usage, this consistency is invaluable. By creating an integrated service that delivers ongoing value, we’re able to ensure a predictable revenue flow throughout the year. This “constant revenue flow” is particularly valuable as our business increasingly emphasizes profitability.

4. Adapt to market needs and maintain flexibility

Different markets have varying needs, and as our business evolves, we continually assess the best approach for each.

In some markets, we’ve introduced a hybrid model combining CS with account management, while in the UK, our close relationship with the sales team allows us to avoid dedicated account management.

Staying flexible and adaptable ensures that we’re meeting each market’s unique demands and making the best use of our resources.

5. Articulate and demonstrate incremental value

Lastly, it’s crucial to consistently communicate the incremental value that success packages bring to the business. This includes proving that the revenue from these packages is additive, not merely replacing or substituting other revenue streams.

We focus on showing that success packages drive true incremental revenue, which strengthens our overall business case.

Gaining executive alignment and maintaining transparency is vital here. Our CEO, a mathematician by trade and our company’s founder, often digs into the data to understand the true impact of these packages.

We continually remind stakeholders of the incremental revenue generated by success packages to reinforce their importance in our overall strategy.

Through these learnings, we’ve established a model that not only drives revenue but also solidifies the value of customer success as a strategic pillar within GoCardless.