What is a "customer success manager" in the first place?
Nowadays, every time I subscribe to a new SaaS service I get some emails from their "customer success manager".
Not sure what they are supposed to be. It looks like "customer support" but sometimes I get email from support AND from customer success managers. Go figure.
"Customer Success Managers" are typically expected to be much more proactive about contacting customers to encourage them to use the service more and get feedback: their role is to keep retention rates high and generate upsell opportunities (which often explicitly targeted to do so) rather than reduce the backlog of customer support tickets.
Of course, it's also a shinier, happier job title for people doing traditional respond-to-tickets customer support or account managers tasked with renewing licences on an annual cycle (or both in some companies). But SaaS companies often have big enough margins, complex/varied enough products and use cases and need to understand their customer bases for it to be worth having a dedicated team sitting in between sales and tech/admin support trying to make sure that people that don't report problems and aren't regularly renegotiating contracts don't get ignored until they cancel. There are also a lot of industries where being contacted periodically to discuss how they might optimise the app for their current workflow or objectives is a source of value rather than irritation, and helps convince companies they're getting a service rather than a cookie-cutter CRUD app for their 50k per annum.
> worth having a dedicated team sitting in between sales
> and tech/admin support
As a customer, I hate it being difficult to reach someone technical. This doesn't sound like it helps that.
Of course, it's generally better the more technical the company is - since if all customers are developers then there's no point in going through a charade of "Hmm, sorry about that! Have you tried turning it off and on again?" type support.
When it's worst is when I'm not actually having any problem myself, I'm just trying to be helpful - like "by the way, if you follow this link you get a 404, correct link is blah".
In this case, I don't want "Sorry about this - we'll look into it for you!", I just want the message to get to the dev that can fix it in seconds, and a "Cheers!" response is more than sufficient.
> As a customer, I hate it being difficult to reach someone technical. This doesn't sound like it helps that.
If they're doing it properly, it should be much easier to reach someone technical, because the dedicated technical support contact still exists and doesn't have to divide their time between dealing with technical issues and sending out "you don't seem to have logged in yet/recently. How can I help you?" messages because a dedicated person is performing the latter function.
And there's no reason why someone holding a "Customer Success Manager" title shouldn't be technical: indeed if the product is something like an API, the Customer Support Manager probably should be an engineer, and a better engineer than the Sales Engineer too. The linked article is basically an argument that Customer Success Managers in adtech really ought to be people with a strong understanding of how to optimise a marketing campaign and not just people that ask how you're doing and tell you where the filters are
Given all comments. The customer support is indeed a sales guy responsible for contacting the customer, getting feedback, giving some advise and help...
Yes. All these things are part of sales. Especially in B2B context.
Different companies use the same title to mean different things, so I can really only speak for what I've seen at my own SaaS company, but - customer success people have the job of making sure the customer is successful in using the product. This involves training them to use it, providing insights as to how best to take advantage of it given their particular use case, following up to make sure the customer is getting value out of the product, and helping to resolve any roadblocks along the way. At least at my company, the CS folks are not very technical - so when those roadblocks are technical in nature, that's when support (which is the team I'm on, so the perspective I'm coming at this from) gets roped in. Depending on the situation, support may advise the CS person who still handles the communication, or support may jump right in and take over the communication, or support and CS may both be communicating with the customer (I personally try to avoid this last configuration because it promotes diffusion of responsibility and I expect it to be more confusing to the customer).
From the perspective of the business, by improving the experience the customer has with the product, CS folks maximize the odds that the customer will be happy with the product, and therefore stay subscribed to it, increase their subscription tier, and recommend it to others.
The experiences described in this writeup are pretty terrible and I'm not sure that organizing those particular CSMs any differently would have produced better results. Organizing CSMs by location also has the benefit that the customer tends to be able to get ahold of the same people on short notice because they're working in the same timezone. And there are a lot more industries than there are timezones. While it does seem plausible to me that if you could pull off CSMs-by-industry it would be more successful, it would be a lot harder and more expensive to do so. I personally don't know whether it's worth the tradeoff.
What is a "customer success manager" in the
first place?
The difference is "customer support" sucks because they're judged by number of tickets closed, response times and escalation rates, incentivising them to give quick, wrong answers driving away customers.
Whereas "customer success" sucks because they're judged by customer retention and revenue increases, and they're largely powerless to increase customer retention (which depends on product features and competitors' offerings, neither of which they have any leverage over), incentivising them to focus on getting the customer to spend more.
That's the entire problem unfortunately. The "Customer Success Manager" role has been redefined to focus on upsells and cross-sells, instead of letting those two numbers result as a consequence of the customer actually being successful with the product.
This echoes some of my recent frustrations with customer success organizations to a T. I'll also add in that many customer success organizations feel like the Post-Sell Upsell Sales Team rather than the Make My Customer Successful Team (upsells might be a goal, but it shouldn't feel that way to customers).
At most SaaS companies, customer success is designed as a slightly-better support function, rather than a value-added consultative function. This is actually an evolution from the old model, where you'd have a more expensive professional services function that accompanied enterprise software purchases, usually because the implementation itself required a great deal of technical sophistication that the cloud has made obsolete.
Customer success managers tend to be lower paid than consultants who have domain expertise and strategic thinking skills. They also typically handle a much larger client load, which makes it hard to invest time in relationships, and have automated their work to the point of annoyance, which makes it hard for them to individualize.
On the other hand, it's not always such a great idea for a company, especially a SaaS company looking to make an exit, to have their own professional services function, let alone a paid services function. Consultants are expensive and have much lower margins than software. They also add headcount and bring down valuations when it's time to sell the business. That's why most software companies a partner ecosystem around their software, rather than trying to do it in house.
Based on my experience, there are a handful of customer success organizations that get this right. But as a discipline, customer success is still meandering around trying to figure out what it really is. At most companies, the legacy is in a customer support function, not a professional services, consultative sales, or account management function. So that's the level of service you get. I'll be interested to see if they'll respond to feedback like the posters and evolve towards a more consultative model.
In the small startups I've been a part of, the Customer Success Manager has been more like the interface for the user to parts of the product we haven't had time to refine.
Our teams are still small, so this person has been essential in helping out in places where the product isn't as refined as we'd like: training, setup + onboarding, UX roughness, etc.
They've also been helpful in understanding our customer's pain points, so we can best direct our modest resources. We regularly learn more about what our product should be from these interactions.
Our users are also very non-technical, so they've been a helping hand getting slow-moving organizations on board. That that end, they regularly receive positive feedback from our users, and are essential at reducing churn.
I can understand why the author had an issue with Hubspot and Google- these are well established companies with refined products and larger teams. Certainly seems like you could end up as a salesman.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadNowadays, every time I subscribe to a new SaaS service I get some emails from their "customer success manager".
Not sure what they are supposed to be. It looks like "customer support" but sometimes I get email from support AND from customer success managers. Go figure.
Of course, it's also a shinier, happier job title for people doing traditional respond-to-tickets customer support or account managers tasked with renewing licences on an annual cycle (or both in some companies). But SaaS companies often have big enough margins, complex/varied enough products and use cases and need to understand their customer bases for it to be worth having a dedicated team sitting in between sales and tech/admin support trying to make sure that people that don't report problems and aren't regularly renegotiating contracts don't get ignored until they cancel. There are also a lot of industries where being contacted periodically to discuss how they might optimise the app for their current workflow or objectives is a source of value rather than irritation, and helps convince companies they're getting a service rather than a cookie-cutter CRUD app for their 50k per annum.
Of course, it's generally better the more technical the company is - since if all customers are developers then there's no point in going through a charade of "Hmm, sorry about that! Have you tried turning it off and on again?" type support.
When it's worst is when I'm not actually having any problem myself, I'm just trying to be helpful - like "by the way, if you follow this link you get a 404, correct link is blah".
In this case, I don't want "Sorry about this - we'll look into it for you!", I just want the message to get to the dev that can fix it in seconds, and a "Cheers!" response is more than sufficient.
If they're doing it properly, it should be much easier to reach someone technical, because the dedicated technical support contact still exists and doesn't have to divide their time between dealing with technical issues and sending out "you don't seem to have logged in yet/recently. How can I help you?" messages because a dedicated person is performing the latter function.
And there's no reason why someone holding a "Customer Success Manager" title shouldn't be technical: indeed if the product is something like an API, the Customer Support Manager probably should be an engineer, and a better engineer than the Sales Engineer too. The linked article is basically an argument that Customer Success Managers in adtech really ought to be people with a strong understanding of how to optimise a marketing campaign and not just people that ask how you're doing and tell you where the filters are
Yes. All these things are part of sales. Especially in B2B context.
From the perspective of the business, by improving the experience the customer has with the product, CS folks maximize the odds that the customer will be happy with the product, and therefore stay subscribed to it, increase their subscription tier, and recommend it to others.
The experiences described in this writeup are pretty terrible and I'm not sure that organizing those particular CSMs any differently would have produced better results. Organizing CSMs by location also has the benefit that the customer tends to be able to get ahold of the same people on short notice because they're working in the same timezone. And there are a lot more industries than there are timezones. While it does seem plausible to me that if you could pull off CSMs-by-industry it would be more successful, it would be a lot harder and more expensive to do so. I personally don't know whether it's worth the tradeoff.
Whereas "customer success" sucks because they're judged by customer retention and revenue increases, and they're largely powerless to increase customer retention (which depends on product features and competitors' offerings, neither of which they have any leverage over), incentivising them to focus on getting the customer to spend more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12642824
At most SaaS companies, customer success is designed as a slightly-better support function, rather than a value-added consultative function. This is actually an evolution from the old model, where you'd have a more expensive professional services function that accompanied enterprise software purchases, usually because the implementation itself required a great deal of technical sophistication that the cloud has made obsolete.
Customer success managers tend to be lower paid than consultants who have domain expertise and strategic thinking skills. They also typically handle a much larger client load, which makes it hard to invest time in relationships, and have automated their work to the point of annoyance, which makes it hard for them to individualize.
On the other hand, it's not always such a great idea for a company, especially a SaaS company looking to make an exit, to have their own professional services function, let alone a paid services function. Consultants are expensive and have much lower margins than software. They also add headcount and bring down valuations when it's time to sell the business. That's why most software companies a partner ecosystem around their software, rather than trying to do it in house.
Based on my experience, there are a handful of customer success organizations that get this right. But as a discipline, customer success is still meandering around trying to figure out what it really is. At most companies, the legacy is in a customer support function, not a professional services, consultative sales, or account management function. So that's the level of service you get. I'll be interested to see if they'll respond to feedback like the posters and evolve towards a more consultative model.
Our teams are still small, so this person has been essential in helping out in places where the product isn't as refined as we'd like: training, setup + onboarding, UX roughness, etc.
They've also been helpful in understanding our customer's pain points, so we can best direct our modest resources. We regularly learn more about what our product should be from these interactions.
Our users are also very non-technical, so they've been a helping hand getting slow-moving organizations on board. That that end, they regularly receive positive feedback from our users, and are essential at reducing churn.
I can understand why the author had an issue with Hubspot and Google- these are well established companies with refined products and larger teams. Certainly seems like you could end up as a salesman.