The BFF Dedicated Customer Success Model
Give every customer one dedicated owner and an annual report card benchmarked against their peers.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 80%
Instead of a traditional sales-and-account-management structure, Epic assigns every one of its 600+ hospital customers a dedicated technical specialist team per product, plus a single named point person — internally nicknamed 'BFF,' for 'best friend forever' — whose only job is ensuring that customer succeeds with Epic's tools. Once a year, Epic sends report cards directly to each customer's CEO, CIO, and CFO, grading them one through five across multiple dimensions and showing benchmark data against peer institutions of similar size. This turns customer success from a reactive support function into a proactive, quantified relationship that keeps expansion and renewal conversations grounded in data, and gives Epic leverage to say no to customers who aren't ready to adopt its standard implementation.
Origin
Extracted from Acquired
How to run it
- 1
Assign a dedicated team per product per customer
Give every customer its own technical specialist team for each product they use, rather than a shared support queue.
- 2
Name a single accountable relationship owner
Designate one person whose sole job is that customer's long-term success across every product, not just closing the next sale.
- 3
Build a standardized scorecard
Create consistent metrics that can be measured across every customer account (e.g., adoption levels, standardization, utilization) so performance is comparable.
- 4
Benchmark against true peers
Group customers into comparable peer sets (e.g., similar size, similar system complexity) so scorecards show relative performance, not just absolute numbers.
- 5
Send the results to economic decision-makers
Deliver the annual report card directly to the customer's C-suite (CEO, CIO, CFO) rather than burying it with day-to-day operational contacts, so it drives budget and adoption decisions.
Pro tip Tie report card outcomes to pricing incentives — Epic offers discounts for staying on standard, well-maintained implementations.
Watch out This only builds trust if the vendor is genuinely willing to tell a customer uncomfortable truths, not just flatter them.
In the wild
Every year, Epic's customer teams send a graded scorecard — one through five across multiple dimensions — directly to each hospital's CEO, CIO, and CFO, along with benchmark comparisons to similarly sized peer health systems.
→ Hospitals get an ongoing, quantified view of how well they're using the platform, which keeps them oriented toward deeper adoption rather than shopping for alternatives.
Common mistakes
Treating customer success as a cost center
If dedicated account ownership isn't backed by real authority and resources, it becomes a titled role without the ability to actually drive outcomes.
Benchmarking against the wrong peer set
Comparing a small community hospital's performance to a massive academic medical center produces meaningless, discouraging scorecards instead of actionable ones.
Is it for you?
Best for
Enterprise vendors with long-term, high-switching-cost relationships who need to keep utilization and expansion high after the initial sale.
Not ideal for
Transactional, low-touch SaaS businesses where per-account white-glove service isn't economically viable.
From the transcript
“every customer has their own dedicated BFF, best friend forever, like BFF who is a single person within Epic and their sole job, their only…”
“they will send separate report cards every year to your CEO, CIO and CFO and they will grade you one through five on a bunch…”
From the episode
Epic Systems (MyChart)