Do Customers Really Care If You Love Them?

Customers don’t buy software because they feel loved. They buy it because the product works, solves a real problem, meets security, scalability, and reliability requirements, and fits their budget. 

No amount of empathy or friendliness can compensate for missing features or poor performance. So at first glance, it’s easy to assume that great products alone win customer loyalty. But once the contract is signed and the product is in use, the rules change. From that point on, whether customers stay, expand, or advocate is driven by the experience they have with the company behind the product.

Research across industries consistently shows this shift. For example, Forrester has found that customer experience can be a stronger driver of loyalty than price alone, while McKinsey shows that moving from average to exceptional customer experiences leads to disproportionately higher retention and long-term value.

So what does it actually take to engineer an exceptional customer experience and, ultimately, their success? “Earning our customers’ love” is one of Confluent’s core values and a key driver of how we define and approach “customer success.” In this post, we’ll explore best practices we’ve established for turning product excellence into real-world data solutions and examples of how the engineering, product and account teams implement these standards in the real world.

Great Products Are Just the Entry Ticket

Customers tend to make purchase decisions based on tangible factors such as quality, price, and critical capabilities like security, reliability, scalability, openness, and the ability to bridge operational and analytical use cases without introducing additional complexity. For example, they look for platforms that can scale reliably, protect sensitive data, and keep critical services running even during failures. Many Confluent customers use Cluster Linking to build resilient multi‑cloud and multi‑region architectures that keep real‑time applications online while also continuously replicating data for downstream analytics. Combined with products like Tableflow, which automatically turns streaming data into analytics-ready tables, this helps ensure that trusted, up‑to‑date data is available for both day‑to‑day operations and reporting.

Ultimately, after adoption, it’s the quality of the experience and how well customer-facing teams support, listen to, and partner with customers that become the strongest predictors of loyalty. While the shift to a streaming‑first data architecture unlocks enormous potential, it also introduces new complexity and risk. Turning that potential into real‑world outcomes requires more than just a strong product; it requires customers to consistently realize value as their environments evolve.

When Is Product Excellence No Longer Enough?

As soon as the customer-vendor relationship begins, the clock is ticking. When will they start to see the business value of their selection and investment? At this stage, the issue is no longer whether the product delivers, but how and when customers realize the desired outcomes for their own users, teams, and businesses.

The product simply opens the door. From the customer’s position, perceived value depends entirely on what they are able to accomplish. This is where customer success management, backed by responsive and seasoned customer support, becomes the connective tissue between product capability and customer outcomes. It turns potential into adoption, adoption into impact, and impact into long-term partnership.

It’s the responsibility of customer success teams to bridge the gap between roadblocks in a customer’s data landscape and their business goals, through enablement, solution design, and implementation support. And this does not happen by accident.

Convincing a customer of a value proposition is one thing; proving it consistently over time is another entirely. Customer success should be delivered through close collaboration across multiple teams, centered around the same goal: ensuring customers have the tools and guidance needed to succeed and realize measurable business value. Within this model, a customer success manager plays a key role, serving as a dedicated ambassador who supports outcomes and represents customer needs internally.

At Confluent, customer success is not a line item on a bill; it is a core part of the broader experience. As one Head of Engineering using Confluent Cloud in a retail organization put it, “It’s this spirit of partnership – grounded in trust, curiosity and shared ambition – that has enabled our teams to innovate faster and build consistent, future‑ready services powered by high‑quality, real‑time data. Confluent didn’t just accelerate our streaming capabilities – they set a new standard for how we think about data streaming, design, and resilience, all while providing a competitive cost to serve. It’s rare to find a partner that not only transforms your architecture but also works hand in hand with you on your transformation journey.”

How to Make Experience and Partnership Really Matter

People may buy from people, but what is the real return on investment (ROI) behind that decision? How does a positive connection compare to a product that increases revenue by $X or reduces infrastructure spend by $Y? Personal connections matter, but building true loyalty and long-term impact goes beyond simple rapport.

True partnership means meeting customers where they are on their journey. It’s about understanding their needs, timelines, and priorities, and aligning as closely as possible to what matters most. This approach shows up in how teams are coordinated to deliver value, bringing together different skills and perspectives into a joined-up engagement that is intentional, relevant, and tailored to what is actually needed. It means operating as an extension of the customer’s team, advocating strongly for their needs, and staying relentlessly focused on helping them realize outcomes.

The philosophy is that customers renew, expand, and champion Confluent not only because the product solves a problem. Customer success teams provide indispensable support in implementation and value realization, and experience consistently proves that customers have a partner they can trust.

Here are five key ways our team shows up to serve customers from day one:

• Understanding customers’ strategic priorities and how Confluent supports them.

• Aligning closely to customer timelines and important milestones.

• Reviewing how success is measured and what “great” looks like.

• Offering a bespoke, multilayered engagement model tailored to customer context.

• Staying genuinely curious about where we can drive additional value.

The aforementioned Head of Engineering we’ve worked with shared, “We’ve genuinely grown to love the partnership we’ve built with Confluent. What began as a way to simplify a fragmented landscape has evolved into a relationship that consistently brings out the best in our teams. Confluent has helped us create a reliable, cloud‑streaming backbone and has been there at every step – guiding us, educating us and challenging us, and championing our success.”

Those are the kind of results and confidence that make customer success as essential as product excellence. Investment decisions are data-driven, so having outcomes documented, measured, and aligned to a customer’s strategic objectives helps make the decision to reinvest with companies like Confluent a simple one. That’s the kind of ROI that holds up and earns long-term loyalty.

What to Do When Things Go Wrong (and They Do)

All sounds great, right? Showing up feels effortless when everything goes according to plan. But what happens when it doesn’t? Commitment to customers is easy when it shows up as success stories, awards, and celebrations, but great customer stories are rarely built on success alone. In reality, they’re shaped by how teams respond when things go wrong. That is the true test of the relationship. It means owning failures as openly as successes and saying, “We hear you, and this is how we're going to fix it.”

It also means truly understanding the issue, not just the technical root cause but also the real business impact on the customer. As with any relationship, this comes from knowing customers well: how they work, what matters to them, and what they find frustrating.

When something inevitably goes wrong, here’s how our team approaches hearing, understanding, and solving the problems at hand:

• Urgency, moving quickly to identify the root cause.

• Understanding the underlying business impact and its severity.

• Connecting customers with the right subject matter experts to provide the right support.

For this approach to be consistent, it can’t just depend on individual heroics; it has to be embedded into day-to-day customer engagement. It’s often the smaller, less visible moments that matter most: being available when a support ticket is raised, making the right introduction at the right time, and taking on the less glamorous tasks that quietly build trust and credibility over time.

Consistently Delivering Value and Care

The work put into earning customer love provides a meaningful competitive edge that is hard to replicate because it builds on deep knowledge, context, and trust developed over time. Competitors may offer similar features or services, but it’s difficult to replicate the history of human interactions, the understanding of customer priorities, or the tailored ways teams have helped solve real challenges.

This is especially important as AI makes people and processes more efficient, but customer love, rooted in genuine interaction and relationship building, can never be outsourced to technology. That’s why our team has built tried-and-tested engagement frameworks that go beyond regular touchpoints or quarterly business reviews. A multi-threaded engagement approach supports the creation of centers of excellence, internal evangelism, and executive alignment across the organization.

This approach is reflected in work with customers such as BMW Group. As data streaming scaled across the organization, success depended not only on the technology but also on building internal expertise, aligning teams, and establishing clear ways of working.

It also involves active curiosity about stakeholders’ ambitions and identifying opportunities to support their growth and visibility within their organizations. Internal account planning sessions focus on customer goals and on how the broader Confluent account team can align to those objectives. Earning customer love is more than a company value; it is ingrained in daily workflows and practices.

Product Wins the Deal – Partnership Sustains the Lifetime

Initial adoption is driven by product functionality. Long-term loyalty, however, is sustained through consistent care, strategic partnership, and a commitment to the customer journey, turning a single transaction into a lifelong relationship.

For those interested in how this plays out in practice, Confluent’s customer stories show how organizations across industries turn product capabilities into real, measurable outcomes through partnership and shared success. From scaling real-time platforms to enabling business transformation, these experiences reflect what customer love looks like when applied consistently and at scale.

Want to hear from our customers firsthand? Join the 2026 Data Streaming World Tour.