r/CustomerSuccess

I'm curious to hear from people working in Customer Success and Customer Support.

Tools like Intercom, Zendesk, and similar platforms offer a lot of features, but depending on the team size and budget, they can sometimes feel unnecessarily expensive or complex.

I'd love to know:

• What platform does your team currently use?
• What's the biggest frustration with your current tool?
• Are there features you wish existed, or things you think these platforms overcomplicate?
• Have you considered switching to a more affordable alternative?

I'm working on a customer support platform called Asking (asking.com.br), and I'd rather learn from people dealing with these challenges every day than build features based on assumptions.

Honest feedback is very welcome!

As I'm sure many of you saw, after 10 years of building this community, reddit admins have removed me as a mod and handed the sub over to a new group of enthusiastic community members. And honestly, it's probably for the best. I'd become so disillusioned and disheartened by what's happened to reddit that I just sort of gave up after a while.

I sincerely hope that the new mod team can get a handle on what's happening. Lord knows they have their work cut out for them and I wish them all the best.

To the members or r/customersuccess, I want to say thank you. Building and participating in this community has been a genuinely positive experience for me. I've learned so much and even got to help a few of you further your careers in the real world (you know who you are).

To the new mods - hmu if there's anything I can help you with during the transition. I'm not on reddit much these day but I'll be sure to check DMs regularly over the next couple of weeks.

✌️

Hi everyone,

I've been a CSM for 4 months, and I feel so drained and even physically sick. I work very long hours, I struggle with sleep occasionally and even dreamt about being in a meeting.

Before this, I have around 6 years of account and relationship management, but I was able to handle it well.

But in this line of work, I work with KAMs, and my role is basically forcing my clients to spend more on our service.

I don't like the sales aspect anymore that's why I took this job, but the company direction seems to enforce it on us that we do sales anyway minus the contracts and billing and force revenue by enforcing product adoption.

Not to mention that we do an everyday EOD with our top executive for updates and progress

I do trainings, product demos and analytics to my clients, but somehow management only focuses on how much are they going to burn in their contract, as that is their definition of success.

Is this an average feeling of a CSM? I used to enjoy different hobbies, travel, and do some personal growth, but my body and mind has led me to always think aboyt work. I can't even take a day off because I don't want to miss out on meeting clients and getting commitments from them.

I want to see if this is a universal experience. Please share your thoughts.

I am considering working for a new company. The job requires 5 days in the office, this is not a problem, as I live fairly close, and the compensation is competitive. My biggest concern, though, is when I went for the final interview, I noticed that all of the team works in a bullpen like environment.

I anticipate that over half of my day will be spent on meetings, considering that some of the team works in the other locations, and our clients are national.

How do you even go about doing this? I’m coming from 10 years of working remotely as a project manager, so this is very different..

Hi everyone. I made it to the second round of an interview for a customer success manager role. I was previously a team lead of 8 CSM’s for a mental health start up. I was a founding CS member and helped build and scale our team. With zero experience in CS before. I was hired as an onboarding/coach. Lots of mess and learning. I was there for almost three year during huge growth. I was Eventually was laid off 18 months ago after a reduction in force. . This is the first interview/job I’m actually excited about as it’s in the same field my last job was in which is very niche. The hiring manager who I had my first call with will review the case study and if she likes it I’ll move forward to a “on site” 4 hour interview with different stakeholders to review.

I’ve never had to do a case study before.

I have ideas and plenty of examples , but as a hiring manager or interviewer can you share with me your favorite types of case studies, what got someone the job, or if you were someone who got the job - I’d love to hear how you went about it. Examples or being willing to share slides would be so appreciated. Not that I would ever copy, just to have a framework , template etc. for me my customers were therapists working with clients and implementing new therapeutic modalities into their practice . My background prior to this was as a clinical therapist which allowed me to really know how to best communicate and build relationships with our customers. . The new company is in the same field but it’s a SaaS/EHR product being sold to clinics, practices and clinicians (drs). Full service platform. which seems safer and easier than the previous company .

Basically I want to show this :

We grew rapidly → the customer base became much more diverse → activation alone wasn’t telling us enough about customer success or health → I identified recurring barriers through data + direct customer interactions → I helped develop interventions based on those barriers, including scalable education/enablement and improved escalation processes → worked across Medical/Product/Support/Community/etc. → measured impact → learned where CS could create value and where structural/company constraints required different solutions.

Background of last role : After sales handoff my job was onboarding training, activation, ongoing monitoring , retention. The constant battle (outside of product and UX issues, was the fact that “activation” meant our customer had to refer a human client to our medical team). This proved to be difficult as we scaled since we no longer just had the “ideal customer/champion” customers. We now had different segments of customers at differing levels of readiness. BUT sales and product and business dev didn’t account for this and just wanted to close. Metrics became the only thing leadership cared about, but underneath those metrics were deeper root causes. Not every account had the same needs and our product was really only built for 2 types of customers. Because we scaled from 800-2400 customers in less then 12 months this started to become a real revenue issue (a lot of churn and a lot of people not activating because of delays for various reasons some truly being that they had to wait for their human clients to be ready and some internal issues we had to worked on ). A few things that happened during this extreme growth was support ticket wait time was up to 1 week when it should have been within 24 hours. This was happening for at least 2-3. I helped create a new workflow within zendesk and using tags within slack so our support agents weren’t the only ones responsible - accounts that needed CS intervention or escalation were now handed off and we could delegate as needed. This improved time to response significantly and within a Few weeks we were back to less then 24 hours. This stayed as an SOP for the time I was there. I also created, implemented and facilitated live trainings and as we scaled live went to on demand which increased platform engagement and faster time to activation. I was at the early stages of helping build out customer segmentation , working on tiered models and help with pilot programs and a/b testing. Taking to leadership about needing insurance and credentialing (we did start to build and add this while I was there which helped )

I want to make sure I’m not long winded, I’m succinct , but also show the impact and value to the customer AND internal teams and show my creativity, relational skills and ability to literally figure it out as we go. Ability to look under the hood, communicate to leadership with not just feelings and ideas but metrics to help support the ideas (even when we didn’t have them yet or if they were skewed).

Instructions are :
you will participate in a case study. This exercise is designed to evaluate your analytical, relationship-management, and communication skills, which are essential for success in this role. Present a real customer success project from your professional experience that you personally led or played a significant role in, focusing on:
• Key metrics you identified and tracked (e.g., product adoption, retention/churn risk, expansion revenue, customer health score, etc.) Your approach to identifying risk or opportunity within the account. How you trained or enabled customers on your platform/software. Any other interventions you implemented and stakeholder management (customer stakeholders, internal cross-functional teams like Product/Implementation/Support). Quantifiable outcomes achieved (retention, expansion revenue, adoption gains, efficiency improvements)

Create a 15 to 20 minute presentation (in
PDF or slide format)
• Include practical examples and specific strategies that demonstrate your expertise
• Show your approach to stakeholder communication and management
• Highlight your methodology for tracking impact and business outcomes
• Demonstrate your technical fluency with the software/SaaS platform involved (and healthcare/EHR/RCM context if applicable)
Demonstrate your understanding of healthcare operations, practice workflows, and/or revenue cycle management
Prepare for an 8-10 minute Q&A session with the interview panel following your presentation
What We're Looking For:
Strategic thinking: Ability to identify high-impact opportunities to drive retention and growth within an account
Healthcare expertise: Understanding of practice operations, provider workflows, and/or revenue cycle management
Data-driven approach: Strong analytical skills with concrete examples of using metrics to drive decisions
Technology fluency: Experience troubleshooting, training users on, and leveraging a software platform to improve customer outcomes
Adaptability: Comfort navigating ambiguity and taking on work beyond a narrowly defined scope to get the job done
Consulting skills: Experience guiding stakeholders through change and performance improvement
Communication: Clear presentation of complex concepts to different audiences (technical, clinical, or business stakeholders)
Results orientation: Track record of delivering measurable business outcomes

I’m about six months into a CSM role at a cybersecurity company, with 5+ years of customer facing experience before this.

I understand that my role is to coordinate resources, drive adoption, own follow-ups, and keep things moving. But sometimes I feel like my contribution is just bringing in other people who do the actual work.
On technical calls, the SE or consultant leads the discussion and answers the customer’s questions. I arrange the meeting, provide context, and own the next steps but I leave wondering what value I personally added.

I’m building my technical knowledge, but it’s frustrating to feel so dependent on others while I learn. I want to contribute more in the moment, beyond scheduling , coordinating and following up afterward.

For other CSMs, especially in technical products: how do you build a stronger sense of ownership and feel useful as an orchestrator? What helped you move from feeling like a middleman to feeling like a trusted partner?

I work in Customer Success, and by definition, my priority is proactive work and the strategic management of a portfolio of business clients, currently consisting of around 300 companies.
As part of the reactive side of my role, I handle several dozen emails every day.
On the proactive side, I analyse account health, prepare reports, statistics and training presentations, assess growth potential, and then reach out to clients based on those insights. I schedule meetings with them where I analyse our cooperation so far, their achievements, growth opportunities and recommendations, upsell additional services, and follow up afterwards. Essentially, I’m responsible for the overall development of the client relationship and retention.
However, my job title also includes elements of account management and collections. In theory, this means I’m supposed to handle questions related to contracts, prepare contract amendments, respond to pricing-related queries, and remind clients to pay overdue invoices. In practice, though, clients see me as the person responsible for everything, basically, a classic support contact.
The problem is that the company is currently pushing us towards sales and proactive work, while at the same time setting up an IVR system so that clients can call us at any time. And, as you would expect from a “dedicated account manager”, they will call us about absolutely everything. I can already see the amount of time that will be wasted on conversations about issues that should never have reached me in the first place.
I genuinely don’t understand the company’s organisational or business strategy here. I don’t see how they expect us to meet our KPIs while simultaneously increasing our availability for support. Global seems to want us to operate as strategic Customer Success Managers, hence the 30 tickets per month, QBRs, etc. while the company is making completely different moves. And ultimately, my job is still CS, with KPIs focused on sales and customer retention.
The problem is that many people on the team are currently working overtime, which isn’t even paid. We’re supposed to work Monday to Friday, yet there are apparently people logging in over the weekends just to catch up on emails and tickets. Our team is overloaded, and our manager seems completely blind to it.
At this point, I’m starting to have this thought in my head „I want to get out of this company” I think my level of overload has reached its absolute limit.
I don’t even know why I’m writing this rant. I guess I need some advice or a reality check, because maybe the problem is actually me and I’m failing to see something obvious. Maybe this is just what corporate life looks like nowadays?

Ever since 2012, when the global proliferation of Customer Success groups really began to skyrocket, the profession has had an identity problem. What is Customer Success? In the Buddhist tradition, there is a parable that offers insight. Several blind men are called in to determine what an elephant is by touching it. "It's like a fan" said one man, touching the ear. "No, it's a plough share," said another, touching a tusk. "It's like a broom," insisted one man, touching the end of the tail. John Godfrey Saxe's poem about it has an apt line: "“Though each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong!” Now we are entering the ai era, and doomsayers are proclaiming the end of the CS profession because most/all/many of the CSM pieces/tasks can be done faster and more economically by ai agents. Like the blind men, they mistake the pieces for the whole. What should we learn from that elephant? To determine our future, we need to look at the purpose of the role.

The Foundational Reality of Customer Success

Every complex/powerful product requires the user to make an investment in learning in order to obtain the promised increase in productivity and profitability. AI is no different. What is being sold to the customer -- and bought by them -- is that promised increase; the technology and the training in using it are only aids to the desired value outcomes. The purpose of the Customer Success team is to increase sustainable proven profitability for both their customers and their company. The lack of common active support for that charter is the proverbial elephant in the room, and it's time for all of us to talk seriously about it. Software companies need to stop selling technology, and start selling provable value outcomes.

The Transition to Value Outcome Operations

Marketing needs to promote promises of specific productivity and profitability gains through buying the company's technology. Sales needs to sell those gains and show how they will be proven. Product needs to build the features into the technology that will deliver the value outcomes -- while being able to track and to prove usage and results. Customer Success guides the customer throughout the journey to obtain those outcomes, and then to show how even more can be gained. At every step of the way, both provider and customer can see how actual usage necessarily ties into proven results.

The transition process begins when all of the functional groups come together to agree on the proven value outcomes that the customer wants to buy, to construct a library that can generate menus from which the customer can select. These need to be provable so that the customer can see the results and how they were obtained. This establishes confidence, and enables more sales to be made. The bulk of a company's profits comes from its customer base, and it's time to begin to operate on that strategic basis.

Note: No part of this article was written or edited by any ai.