Hi all - long time listener, first time caller.
VP of CS here at one of the larger AI native startups. I’ve been toying with the idea of an AMA on what we look for in an IC, our tech stack, or anything else that yall or curious about!
I’ve built CS functions at 6 different startups in my career, and currently lead a team of ~80 CSMs. Top CSMs bring home ~$250k, with “junior” roles starting at $140k OTE.
I feel like people can come up with a million reasons why someone would churn but in my experience it's really just three
Two of which are in your companies control and one less so but am I missing anything?
I’m trying to set up a pooled inbox for my CS team of 4 people with about 165 accounts and I was wondering how others have approached this. We are using Gmail and it seems difficult to have everyone just share a log in. Would it be better to wire this through hubspot or something? Any advice is helpful. Thanks!
Did you pick your industry on purpose or fall into it? If you pivoted, what pushed you to make the move? And if you stayed, what made it worth staying?
I’m in B2B SaaS, in an industry that isn’t very exciting to me. The work itself is fine and I’m doing well, but I wonder whether I’d go further somewhere I actually found the space interesting.
I work in Customer Success at a SaaS company, specifically as an Onboarding Specialist. A big part of my role is to understand the customer’s business, goals, and current processes, then build an onboarding plan around those goals and connect them with the right features/use cases to drive adoption. The challenge I keep running into is getting some customers to engage in the first place.
Sometimes they:
I try not to send the generic “Hi, please book your onboarding call” type of message. I usually research the business beforehand and reach out mentioning that I’ve looked at their use case, have some ideas for how they could use the platform, and want to understand their workflow before recommending anything.
Still, there are always customers who are difficult to activate.
For the onboarding/CS people here:
What has actually worked for you to increase first-call booking and onboarding engagement?
EDIT: This is more of a "building a CS team from zero" post than reachout advice.
Hi, I've been in Customer "Success" for around 3 years, and mostly doing tech support/GP attainment via opportunity creation, rather than true expansion. Surprisingly enough, I've hit a wall with asking AI to help with CS since our org is so unique. We don't own/ship the product we support, we are a reseller of the product.
We are a very small team and I am looking for solid reach out techniques that consistently get meetings on the calendar. We just started trying to track NRR this year and that has fallen off because our data is still being optimized in our CRM. We are adopting the new HubSpot CS workspace with Health scoring, project mgmt, etc. Meetings on the calendar are really the main metric leadership looks at along with opportunity creation, so I am trying to fight the good fight to actually transition into doing full time CS Ops. We are still building the processes and SOPs.
I am not the team lead, manager, etc. but I am in charge of setting up the health scoring so I am taking charge on the rest of the dashboard. Kind of an odd spot to be in but it is what it is.
Idk if I’m doing anything wrong. I’m in Canada and have been sending out applications since May this year. I’ve had a couple of interviews here and there, and sometimes even made it to final rounds but I just can’t seem to land one. I have 4 years of Saas CSM experience. Anyone else in this position?
I don’t know if anyone else is feeling this, but my inbox has been flooded lately with companies trying to sell some new miracle AI tool for CS.
Had one recently tell me they could guarantee 100% GRR lol.
It’s just a lot of huge promises around pretty unrealistic stuff. Guarantee retention, expand every account, automate your CSMs, etc.
Everything sounds good in the pitch, but I haven’t spoken to anyone in CS who has seen real results.
I will say, the one pretty boring idea i've been thinking about building myself is just having something monitor customer activity in the background?
Not even sure exactly what I’d want it to catch. Maybe just things I’m likely to miss, especially across lower-touch accounts.
Has anyone built something like this with Claude or found a tool that does it well?
Hey everyone, asking here a million $ question that has been keep me up at night quite a lot recently.
Some context:
We are a very sales oriented CS team (reporting directly to the CRO), in charge of managing:
We have been experiencing quite a spike in churn requests for SMB, hence I started evaluating some CS dedicated platform to leverage all the data we have at our disposal to prevent churns and maximize expansion (ChurnZero, ImpactPilot, Vitally, Planhat, etc.) but none of them seems to cover what I need (easy to use, able to spot upsell opportunities, and churn risks) without a huge intervention from my end. My dream outcome is that CSMs open their HS tasks and start their day without having to dig deep down and manually into HS and other data sources, so productivity is maximized and they can focus more on the human relationship part of the job.
So far the platforms I liked the most are Vitally and Planhat, but I am also evaluating to do everything in-house (through Claude) with the help of a bizops, a data scientist and some other people whom I might need for this.
Do you have any relevant experience, advices or want to brainstorm about it?
We're shortlisting support vendors right now because our ticket volume outgrew what four people can hold, and every provider has said "dedicated team" within ten minutes of the call starting.
It covers at least three setups though, since some mean named agents who only touch your queue, some mean agents assigned to you on paper who are quietly covering two other accounts when your volume dips, while one clearly meant a shared pool with our logo on the dashboard.
What sorted it fastest was asking whether the agents work any other account, who owns the training material after month three and and whether they log into our Zendesk or work in a mirrored system and copy things across. The last question caught two of them out.
Ramp answers ranged from two to six weeks depending on how much product knowledge the role needs, so I'm assuming anyone quoting less than that has people sitting idle.
What did you ask that turned out to matter more than you expected?
I find myself most days tinkering around with claude and some loose customer data.
Mainly trying to find signals and i kind of run the same routine everyday.
Open claude, upload some data, ask some questions, and try to find something new.
So now I'm wondering if anyone has had any like real proactive experiences with ai?
I think I would love to wake up every morning with whats changed? kinda like what should i be worried about?
I know there's a data hygiene problem hiding in there as well but has anyone had some good experience building something to do this or using some tools?
For CS teams, how are you tracking customer asks that do not fit neatly into support?
Things like onboarding follow-ups, custom reporting requests, internal handoffs etc, they are not always bugs or support tickets but they still need owners and follow-through. If they only live in the CSM’s notes or Slack messages they are very easy to miss.
So how can these be managed? Preferably a way that wont create more work for those involved
I currently work at a Healthcare Software Development company as a Lead Client Success Specialist in a fully remote environment making $72k. The job itself feels stable, is medium stress (sometimes much higher), but as I get closer to 30 years old and finish up my Masters in Business Analytics degree, I want a job that will actually allow me to move out and support myself financially. For this reason I am aiming for jobs with a salary of minimum $95k a year.
After months of applying, I’ve been feeling quite discouraged barely hearing back for jobs I’ve on paper seemed like a great fit for that also fits what I’m looking for. Today I got an interview request for a Customer Success Manager with a salary of $120k-$180k with good benefits and a hybrid work environment for a Healthcare AI company. The company itself really aligns with my interests, the salary is great, and I like that it is not fully in person. I know it’s just an interview request but I can’t help but worry about the burnout risk of working as a Customer Success Manager as I’ve heard the work life balance is pretty bad and a lot of people feel burnt out in the field. For this reason, I want to hear from actual CSM’s how they feel about their job and whether the high salary has felt worth it. I’ve listed some questions below. Could any CSM professionals please provide their thoughts?
Thanks in advance!!
Note Added After Post: Thank you all so much for providing such great guidance, I am very exhausted from work so I don’t have the strength to respond to everyone right now but I will respond back
We are a 40-person SaaS business, and ticket volume grew to be about 800 per month. Our 3-person support team couldn't handle it any more. So, we decided to evaluate BPO options 4 months ago. CSAT score was 87%, which is quite close to our in house numbers. Actually, response times are better than before. It's still early but its not a failure. Just wondering what options have other companies had at this point in time? Especially BPOs working with startups without enterprise minimums. How did evaluation go?
How’s the job market looking in everyone’s respective areas? Given the AI environment, there’s two different outlooks I’ve heard:
AI is getting leveraged more and more to pick up pieces and be a resource for smaller accounts + do the admin work on where an account is at.
Customers will always want a human to talk to, build relationships, and overall maintain that relationship.
I lean towards how customers always need someone to talk to (or yell at). But man, looking around and trying to find a different position is rough. To be fair, the current US economy does not help at all.
Just looking for opinions or a discussion.
Fala, pessoal. Tudo bem?
Sempre trabalhei como Analista de Relacionamento/CS Júnior, com forte foco em onboarding. Quem viveu essa rotina sabe bem como é: a gente entra em uma dinâmica que mais parece a linha de montagem da Ford. É volume, processo engessado e um incêndio atrás do outro para apagar. No fim do dia, a sensação é de que faltou tempo até para respirar, quem dirá para desenvolver um pensamento mais analítico ou estratégico.
O problema é que o tempo passou, fui promovido a Pleno, e agora bateu aquela famosa síndrome do impostor. A verdade crua é: eu não sei fazer outra coisa a não ser atender chamados e apagar incêndios. Sinto que virei um especialista em executar o operacional, mas travei na hora de analisar dados, olhar o cenário macro do cliente e gerar valor de verdade.
Para quem já passou por essa transição ou lidera a área: se você pudesse dar um único conselho para o seu "eu" do passado nessa mesma situação, qual seria?
Como escapar da armadilha de continuar sendo apenas o "bombeiro" da operação agora que o cargo exige muito mais cabeça e estratégia?
I am not in CS, but I am applying for CSM-adjacent roles such as deployment strategist/FDE. I am tired of failing these interviews. Every failed interview feels like I will never be able to apply to that company ever again.
Problem: I have been getting a fair number of recruiter screen intervews; sometimes I even get inbound. But I keep failing them. I have completed 5-6 recruiter screens consecutively over the past few months. Is this a common experience nowadays given the employer's market, or is it a pattern specific to me?
Observations:
How is my resume getting selected, but I am not making it past the recruiter screen?
It's renewal season and we've been going through our stack.
We just cut a survey tool and an old BI dashboard but kept BuildBetter because it reads our calls and tickets and gives each account a short narrative of what changed since last month, which knocked out most of the QBR prep grunt work.
Gainsight seems to hold at enterprise but a few people I know at under 500 companies are back in the market, so wondering what that looks like for others.
Anyway, what's on your keep list and what got cut?
Hello everyone! I work at a B2B software company.
Our company collects customer information from sales calls, support tickets, surveys, CSM notes and product data. So we have lots of info but it is not stored in 1 place because it is collected by different teams who own different tools.
When CSM needs customer intelligence to understand account’s health, risks and needs, a couple of people need to go through different files. Additionally, we usually find “the loudest” opinions, not the common problems. Because of this, sometimes we react to individual complaints instead of identifying patterns early and taking proactive action.
In your experience, how does the Customer Success team collect and organize customer intelligence? Who is responsible for the process in companies?
Hi friends,
I currently work for a MDR provider in the IT/Cyber Security field and have been here for 4 years with a great resume & killer upsell and retention numbers.
Anyone know of any good CS roles in this field? My base is $95k with an OTE of $150k, but I am looking for something higher in comp with a better work life balance.