Customer success management is about proactively helping customers achieve their goals with your product or service.
Customer success managers are the glue that connect sales, support and the customer to ensure long-term value and satisfaction.
The goal of customer success management is to reduce churn by maximizing the value customers get from your offerings.
Learn how Tallyfy can help you track and automate your customer success workflows here.
Who is this article for?
- B2B SaaS companies
- Subscription-based businesses
- Companies with complex products or services
- Customer success teams
- Account managers
- Sales and support leaders
The roles above are most relevant to customer success management because they are focused on building long-term, high-value customer relationships in industries where churn is a major risk. Customer success helps maximize retention and growth within the existing customer base.
What is customer success management and why does it matter?
Customer success management (CSM) is a business methodology that focuses on proactively helping customers achieve their desired outcomes and goals while using your product or service. Rather than just reacting to customer problems, CSM takes a holistic, long-term approach to delivering value and driving customer loyalty.
The core mission of a customer success manager is to make the customer as successful as possible, thereby maximizing the value they receive from your offering. This in turn improves key business metrics like retention, expansion revenue, advocacy and overall customer lifetime value.
Quote
Your product or service did not make the customer successful. Your customer makes their own success. By accepting that, you put the customer first.
– Brian Gladstein, CEO & Co-founder at Explorics
While fields like sales, marketing and support are well-established, customer success management is a newer discipline that has emerged with the rise of the subscription economy. In a traditional transactional model, the relationship often ends once a sale is made. But in a subscription business, that’s just the beginning – you need to continuously deliver value to retain that customer over the long run.
As Bose (2002) explains, customer success management is a key component of an overall customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. It goes beyond just storing customer data to proactively leveraging those insights to enhance the customer experience and value.
Customer success management has quickly evolved from a buzzword to a critical business function. A study by Hochstein et al. (2023) found that CSM has been widely adopted across B2B industries as a way to boost retention. The research revealed that a central element is tracking “customer health” – a mix of relationship, product usage and value realization metrics.
What are the key responsibilities of a customer success manager?
A customer success manager is responsible for monitoring, securing and enhancing customer success, as Hilton et al. (2020) describe. While the specific activities can vary, there are a few core areas:
1. Onboarding and education
Getting a customer up and running quickly and effectively is critical to long-term success. Customer success managers help onboard new clients, provide training and best practices, and ensure they are able to achieve their initial goals with the product. The aim is to minimize time-to-value.
Tip
Create an onboarding checklist covering the key steps a customer needs to complete, along with helpful resources for each one. Share this with customers to give them a clear path to success.
2. Proactive relationship management
Rather than just engaging reactively when issues arise, customer success managers build consultative relationships with clients. They regularly check in to collect feedback, assess satisfaction, identify challenges and uncover new opportunities to add value.
Prohl-Schwenke & Kleinaltenkamp (2021) found that business customers judge the quality of a supplier’s customer success management on factors like speed of response, reliability of information, and ability of staff. Investing in the relationship is key.
Quote – Delores Cooper
A tendency for relationship building and doing it quickly, is [very] valuable. The customer needs to trust your product and industry knowledge, trust that you understand their use case and trust that your recommendations really are in their best interest.
Customer Success Associate at Zendesk. See more quotes
3. Value realization
Ultimately, the role of customer success is to help clients maximize the value they get from your offering. CSMs track key usage and outcome metrics to quantify the ROI being delivered. They look for ways to drive further adoption and optimization to enhance that value over time.
Fact
A survey by Forrester found that 81% of B2B customers say “customer success” is important or very important when selecting new vendors.
What skills and traits make a good customer success manager?
Effective customer success managers tend to have a unique blend of technical expertise and soft skills:
- Industry knowledge: CSMs need to deeply understand their clients’ businesses, goals and challenges. They act as a trusted advisor and consultant.
- Product expertise: To help customers succeed, CSMs must know the ins-and-outs of their own product’s features and use cases. They often collaborate closely with product teams.
- Relationship building: Empathy, emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are critical for CSMs to build trust and rapport with clients. They need to be great communicators and listeners.
- Project management: Juggling multiple clients means CSMs need to be organized and have strong attention to detail. Being process-oriented helps keep everyone on track.
- Data fluency: Tracking the right metrics is key to monitoring customer health and value. CSMs should be comfortable deriving insights from product usage data, survey results, etc.
How can Tallyfy help enable customer success management?
Tallyfy is a workflow management platform that helps teams digitize and automate their processes. Here are a few ways it can support an effective customer success program:
Digitize your customer playbooks with Tallyfy’s AI-driven documentation
Tallyfy lets you easily document your customer success playbooks, including key activities, resources and best practices for onboarding, check-ins, escalations, renewals and more. Centralize your team’s knowledge and automatically surface the right guidance at the right time.
Streamline customer onboarding with structured intake
Create trackable onboarding workflows that collect key customer information, automate tasks and hand-offs, and provide visibility. Ensure every new client has a smooth experience and fast time-to-value.
Proactively monitor accounts with real-time tracking
Set up automated workflows to track key customer health metrics and trigger actions. Get alerted to at-risk accounts and intervene early. Understand the status of any account at a glance without manual effort.
Close the loop with customers using customer-facing links
Easily collect input and approvals from customers with secure, login-free external links. Collaborate seamlessly on success plans, feedback surveys, document reviews and more.
What are some risks and pitfalls to avoid with customer success management?
- Not aligning CSM goals with the customer’s goals: CSMs need to intimately understand what the client is trying to achieve and how they define success – not just focus on their own internal metrics. Regularly revisit this to stay aligned.
- Failing to operationalize customer success: Delivering a consistently great customer experience requires defined, repeatable processes. Don’t rely on ad hoc heroics – build playbooks for key workflows like onboarding, business reviews, renewals, etc.
- Under-investing in CSM enablement: Equip your team with the right training, content, tools and data to excel in their roles. Capturing and centralizing best practices is key as you scale.
- Viewing CSM as purely reactive: While putting out fires is part of the job, the greatest opportunity in customer success is proactively monitoring health and identifying ways to add value. Build in touchpoints to get ahead of issues.
- Not connecting CSM to the rest of the business: Customer success should have a direct line into product, sales, marketing and support. Create feedback loops to share insights both ways.
Quote
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
– Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple
In today’s customer-centric world, business success depends on customer success. Companies that embrace customer success management are able to build deeper client relationships, drive long-term value and loyalty, and ultimately improve retention and growth.
The key is to be proactive and holistic in helping customers achieve their goals. By combining the right people, processes and technology, organizations can operationalize customer success at scale. Tallyfy can help by providing a platform to digitize and automate key CS workflows, and integrate them across the business.
To learn more about how Tallyfy powers customer success management, book a demo today.
How Is AI Transforming Customer Success Management?
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies is having a profound impact on the field of customer success management. These cutting-edge tools are enabling companies to better understand their customers, predict potential issues, and proactively engage to drive retention and growth.
One key way AI is being leveraged is through predictive analytics. By analyzing vast amounts of customer data, machine learning algorithms can identify patterns and predict which customers may be at risk of churning. This allows customer success teams to take proactive steps to address issues and keep customers happy and engaged. As Bose (2002) notes, a critical component of successful CRM is “the ability to predict the probability of a customer defecting to a competitor.”
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are also transforming how companies engage with customers. These tools can handle many routine customer inquiries and issues, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex and strategic interactions. Chatbots can also proactively reach out to customers with personalized tips, product recommendations, and other value-added touches.
Fact
According to a Gartner report, worldwide spending on customer experience and relationship management software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018.
Another exciting frontier is using AI and machine learning to optimize and personalize the customer journey. By analyzing how customers interact with a product or service over time, these systems can identify opportunities to better guide users, deliver relevant information and resources, and generally improve the customer experience. “Customer Success Management forefronts the customer as the primary actor supported by the seller, rather than the seller acting upon the customer” (Hilton et al., 2020).
What Future Technologies Could Further Disrupt Customer Success?
Looking ahead, several emerging technologies could take customer success to the next level:
- Augmented reality (AR): AR could allow for immersive, contextual customer support and education. Imagine being able to virtually “see” how to troubleshoot an issue or optimize usage of a product.
- Internet of Things (IoT): As more products become smart and connected, IoT data will give unprecedented insights into how customers are using products, allowing for hyper-personalized engagement.
- Blockchain: Blockchain technology could enable secure, decentralized customer data management, giving customers more control while still allowing vendors to glean valuable insights.
- Emotion AI: Emotion recognition technology could help gauge customer sentiment in real-time, enabling rapid response to frustrations and opportunities to celebrate successes.
The potential business benefits are immense – from reduced churn and higher lifetime value to more upsell/cross-sell opportunities and greater brand loyalty. Companies that harness the power of AI and stay on the cutting edge of innovation will be well-positioned to exceed customer expectations and thrive in an increasingly customer-centric world. As Kleinaltenkamp et al. (2022) put it: “suppliers need to prove that value that has been promised in a value proposition is delivered to the customers or even exceeded in the post-purchase usage processes.”
Related Questions
What do you mean by customer success management?
Customer success management is all about making sure your customers achieve their desired outcomes and goals by using your product or service. It’s a proactive approach that focuses on building strong, lasting relationships with customers. The idea is to help them get the most value possible, which in turn leads to happier customers, reduced churn, and more opportunities for growth through upsells, cross-sells, and referrals.
Is customer success the same as CRM?
While customer success and customer relationship management (CRM) are related, they’re not quite the same thing. CRM is more about managing and tracking all your interactions and data related to customers. It’s often seen as a sales tool. Customer success, on the other hand, is more focused on what happens after the sale. It’s about making sure customers are truly successful and satisfied with your product over the long term. So while CRM is an important piece of the puzzle, customer success takes a broader, more holistic view.
What is a CSM tool?
A customer success management (CSM) tool is a software platform that helps companies manage and optimize their customer success efforts. It provides a centralized place to track customer data, health scores, interactions, and more. CSM tools often include features like automated playbooks, in-app engagements, feedback collection, and reporting. The goal is to give customer success teams the insights and capabilities they need to proactively guide customers to success, flag potential issues early, and continually improve the customer experience.
What is customer success management strategy?
A customer success management strategy is essentially your game plan for how you’ll help customers achieve success with your product or service. It outlines the key goals, processes, and tactics your team will use. This typically includes things like onboarding programs to get customers up and running smoothly, regular check-ins to ensure they’re on track and thriving, and proactive outreach if red flags appear. The strategy should be tailored to your specific customers’ needs and desired outcomes. It’s all about being intentional and proactive in driving customer success, rather than just reacting when issues arise.
