The Company You Keep: Why “ProPersonal” Client Success Matters

I sent his toddler son some dinosaur monster trucks after he returned home from a stay in the hospital.

I asked her to tell me all about the long-anticipated cruise she took through the Greek Isles.

I made a special trip back to Nothing Bundt Cakes when I realized she couldn’t enjoy the original cakes I brought to campus (full of gluten).

I looked him in the eye and told him how lucky I was to have a client who also became such a meaningful friend. 

Client Success can look like many things. It can be robotic, a relationship centered around a bunch of checked boxes next to statements like “Reviewed client’s usage statistics,” or “Asked client if they had any concerns with Support.” It can be dry, with conversations focused solely on technical configuration and troubleshooting. These are important things, of course, and we’ll revisit them in a moment.

But Client Success can also be full of heart, of genuine care, and connection. It can be a relationship of trust, transparency, advocacy, and support. I like to think of it as being “ProPersonal,” an approach that brings together the professionalism our customers deserve with the personal touch that turns a vendor relationship into a true partnership. And that’s what we do really well at Liaison.

As a customer, the Client Success function should be your avenue to realizing maximum value in your investment. That’s where things like those usage statistics, troubleshooting, and addressing concerns come into play. These are key parts of Client Success work, because our goal and purpose is to walk beside you through your time as a partner.

It’s more than that, though: It’s brainstorming and dreaming and scheming and making a plan for all of these things to come to life. More importantly, it's seeing your Client Success partner as more than the person you call when something breaks. It's having someone who understands your goals, challenges your thinking, and helps connect today's work to tomorrow's possibilities.

A Client Success partnership should also be rooted in personal connection and care. Client Success professionals choose this line of work because building relationships is what we wake up and come to work wanting to do every day. It matters that we celebrate your wins, know what brings you joy, simply laugh together from time to time, and see you for the people you are behind the titles and the responsibilities.

We so easily get caught up in the grind of the day to day that, even as we partner together in that grind, it’s important to be able to talk about the vacation, the graduation, the last episode of the show we both like or the latest TikTok trend. Those conversations may seem small; in reality, though, they build trust not just when everything is going well, but in the moments in between.

So yes, Client Success can look like a lot of things. And while there’s perhaps no singularly “correct” model of Client Success, it’s worth asking what you’re getting out of the partnership with your Client Success team. If it doesn’t include a healthy mix of all of the things mentioned here — the professional, the personal, and everything in between — it may not be serving you well.

At Liaison, this “ProPersonal” fusion of purpose is what drives the people behind the progress, both for our customers and for our own organization.

The company you keep matters. Here at Liaison, we're grateful for the partnerships we've built and we’re excited for the ones we've yet to create.