r/CustomerSuccess

We’ve got a pretty standard support setup. nothing fancy. tickets come in from email, portal, chat, and everything gets triaged normally like any other queue. the problem is we don’t really see incidents early. we only realize something is wrong once it’s already affecting a lot of employees.

here’s what happens most of the time:

- one or two employees report small issues like slow loading or login errors
-support treats them as individual cases because nothing looks connected yet
-a few more tickets come in from different teams, but still seem unrelated
-nothing triggers an alert because each ticket on its own looks minor
-eventually the volume spikes and only then someone realizes it’s a system wide issue
-by the time it’s flagged as an incident, employees have already been dealing with it for a while
-engineering then spends time reconstructing what happened instead of catching it early

we’ve tried dashboards and alerts, but most of the early signals are buried in scattered tickets, so the pattern only becomes obvious after the damage is already done. feels like all the information is there, it just isn’t being connected fast enough to act on it early.

how are teams detecting incidents early before they turn into full scale outages?

Curious how SaaS teams using HubSpot are identifying churn risk from support conversations today.

Manual tagging? CS reviews? Custom workflows?

I'm putting together a mutual action plan for a deal, but i'm not sure what key elements i need to include to make it work. I want to make sure its clear for both sides, so nothing gets missed or misunderstood. Do you guys know what's the best way to structure them, should i focus on deadlines, responsibilities, and next steps, or is there something else i should be thinking about?

Would love some advice on making it simple but effective so everyone's on the same page.

Curious to hear from people in support, customer success, support engineering, TAM, escalation teams, etc. AI seems to be changing support orgs very fast right now.

Some changes I’m personally seeing:

• Tier 1 support getting heavily automated with AI chat agents and internal copilots
• Support engineers expected to know basic prompt engineering and AI workflows
• More pressure to analyze logs, telemetry, SQL, APIs, and production systems instead of just ticket handling
• AI generating draft responses, RCA summaries, and troubleshooting steps automatically
• Knowledge base quality suddenly becoming critical because AI is only as good as the docs it retrieves
• Support moving closer to engineering/product because AI tools expose product gaps much faster
• Customers expecting near real-time responses because “AI should know the answer”
• Increase in hybrid roles like AI Support Engineer, Support + Automation Engineer, Support Reliability Engineer, etc.
• More expectation to automate repetitive operational tasks using scripts, AI agents, workflows, MCPs, or internal tooling

At the same time, I also see new problems:

• Hallucinated troubleshooting steps
• AI confidently pointing customers to outdated docs
• Junior engineers relying too much on AI without understanding systems deeply
• Harder escalation cases reaching humans because easy tickets are already deflected

For people working in SaaS support today:

• What’s changing the most in your role?
• What skills are suddenly becoming important?
• Is AI reducing workload or just changing the kind of work?
• Are your companies restructuring support teams because of AI yet?

Would love to hear real experiences from the field.

I work as a CSM at a SaaS tech company and have about 40 customers ranging from high touch to low touch, meeting anywhere from monthly to quarterly. We stay in touch around news, goal setting, new features, regulatory updates and general questions. Things are going well with nearly all of them.

One customer keeps inviting me to up to 2 internal meetings per week, each up to an hour long, with no set agenda. Their reasoning is so they can get answers immediately without following up. Unlike every other customer, they refuse to handle technical issues within their own IT team and want me present for every conversation. My department standard is monthly meetings and my manager has explicitly advised me not to get pulled into this pattern.

The previous CSM on this account never set boundaries and regularly went above and beyond our agreement. When I tried to limit meetings to our monthly cadence and asked for agendas when additional meetings are requested, the customer got upset, said their previous CSM was more available and threatened to find another vendor.

I am relatively new to customer success, not new to working with customers, but this situation has been genuinely tough. How would you handle this?

Currently in the luxury automotive space working in a high-volume BDC / operations-focused role.

My background is heavily centered around:
• CRM management
• lead distribution and pipeline control
• customer communication
• appointment performance
• process improvement
• sales support operations
• working between management, reps, and inbound teams
• training / onboarding style support

I’ve helped improve performance in multiple environments and I’m now trying to identify the highest income career paths that actually fit this skill set long term.

Main goals:
• Hybrid or remote
• Strong income ceiling
• Growth path
• Ideally tech, SaaS, operations, CRM, customer success, enablement, onboarding, RevOps, implementation, or similar

Located in the Pacific Northwest.

Would appreciate real suggestions from people who’ve made a similar move out of dealership life or know industries that value this background.

Comments or PMs both appreciated.

We deployed an AI support agent expecting major ticket deflection but the real issue turned out to be our knowledge base not the model.

A lot of our KB content was outdated, duplicated, or missing entirely for newer features. The AI simply amplified the bad knowledge it was retrieving.

Now I am thinking more about knowledge governance than AI tuning itself:
• Which articles are verified?
• Which ones drifted from the product?
• Which docs are likely to generate wrong answers?

Feels like “knowledge rot” may become one of the biggest hidden problems in AI-powered support

Curious if others deploying AI support agents are seeing the same thing?

Looking for advice from CX leaders running AI voice agents at real volume.

We're a fintech and our AI voice agent now handles around 100k inbound calls a month — billing questions, account issues, the usual mix. It's been a win on cost and response time. The problem now is reporting up to leadership.

Every Monday our exec team wants to know things like why customer sentiment shifted last week, what's driving the spike in cancellation requests, whether certain account types are calling more often than others. Real voice of customer questions.

Today we answer those by pulling a sample of 50 calls, listening to them, categorizing by hand, and writing up the patterns we noticed. It takes the team most of the week. The answer is always partial because we're sampling 50 out of 100,000.

How are other CX teams in this position handling reporting? Is anyone happy with what they're doing today, or is everyone stuck on sampling and guessing?

RANT

Finished 3 rounds of interview for a CSM with an agreed paycut and now they want a role play. ROLE FUCKING PLAY.

😭😭😭😭 HOW DO YALL PREP FOR THIS ?

It's so annoying. Every role play is down right open ended. Like yes Sarah i know your company products completely and will try to upsell you with the unfair advantage you have about your existing client reactions.

Any help appreciated, it's on Friday.

Update: The head of Cx is taking an off on Friday so they pushed it for tomorrow

Update: they came in 5 mins late.Felt super rushed in the roleplay and they felt I should have pivoted and upselled when they were pointing escalations in terms of lack of support from the team. They were like ooh we did not feel the closeness with client by saying always feel free to reach out to me on WhatsApp. I HATE THIS AMBIGUITY. my real time client relationships are built over time and trust not a bro bro conversation 😞 they were also away from the client context. 😭😭😭 bury myself somewhere in this economy.

Ugh. I don't think I'm getting the role.

Hey everyone,

How are you going with job search these days? I’ve been trying to look for another opportunity with higher package but it’s been sooo difficult. Job market in Sydney is so tough. I’ve had interviews where I made it to the final round usually takes about 4-5 and still didn’t get selected.

I’ve started my job search since late last year. Not rushing but just feels stuck at the moment.

Hi all, I’ve already gotten a lot of helpful tips from older threads here, but figured I’d ask anyway in case anyone has advice they’d want to share.

I’m in a final-round interview process for a remote Customer Success Manager role, and part of it is a mock QBR/business review role-play with leadership acting as the client. It’s less about presenting slides and more about handling the interaction, conversation flow, questions, and overall meeting dynamic.

I already have my deck and notes done, so I’m not really looking for content feedback. I’m more curious about how these usually feel in practice. Do they typically start “in character” right away? Is it more conversational at first? How intense do these role-play scenarios usually get?

I do have some acting/public speaking experience, but this still feels different since it’s evaluative and interactive at the same time. I don’t think they’re trying to destroy me or anything, but I’m definitely nervous and would love to hear how these usually go for people who’ve been through them.

TIA!

EDIT: This is for a made up product. Not the companies actual offerings!

Hey people! I need some recommendations for solid customer success software tools that have good AI features.

I'm part of a growing CS team and we are looking for a new tool to help us manage customers, find churn signals, etc. I’ve explored all the traditional CSPs in the past (Gainsight, ChurnZero, etc) but I want to know what’s new in the market since there are a lot of newer AI tools popping up lately. Ideally I’d like to get some info from people who have actually bought/used these tools.  

Our must-have requirements are

• Being able to connect data points across our existing tools (most importantly Salesforce, Slack and Jira)
• Automations/agents for handling low-touch segments
• Churn signals and health scoring

But also would be interested in hearing about cool new things the tool can do with AI.

I work at an e commerce agency where I started effectively as an assistant, worked up to account manager in charge of deciding strategy on an account (more or less running the clients’ e commerce business), and most recently added on leading onboarding for clients to make sure the AM and rest of the team get our relationship started properly.

However, they are taking away most of my accounts and moving me up to the Head of Customer Success. This role has never existed at the company. Initially, my responsibilities would be the full funnel, be involved in the sales process (or make sales myself!), translate that into a smooth transition towards onboarding, and if the client leaves, own that process too. I’m also in charge of training all new account managers.

Is this normally what Head of Customer Success looks like? I’m only 4 years into my career so it seems like a great opportunity, but I also don’t see how the role grows into direct people management.

How do I manage this?? I took over a client and my predecessor had shared with me client’s preference for quarterly face to face during QBRs. Management being from another country has expectations for me to work out of their office and get there by slowly going through monthly, weekly and eventually that.

My plan now is to just listen to management and ask the client for such frequency and let them push back. Maybe management says I’m not doing enough later but I don’t know what else to do.

Some of you may remember me posting an early version of Tandem here a while back. Got really helpful feedback, and I’ve been iterating since. Looking for a few CSMs willing to spend 20 minutes poking at the new version.

Context: I’ve been building it for myself for about a year because I got tired of success plans drifting from the customer outcome they’re meant to deliver. The new version has HubSpot integration, AI-generated plan structure, a customer-facing shared view, and a Claude.ai connector. Free, no paid tier, no email funnel.

What I’d value: 20 minutes building a plan for one of your real accounts, then tell me what felt wrong, what’s missing, what’s confusing.
DM me and I’ll send a link. Happy to jump on a quick call too.

So I’m building a product that sort of helps the CS teams, basically a tool that helps you make product videos and more with screen recordings, but here’s the thing, I’m looking to solve a more real and challenging problem in this domain, I need guidance and advice from some real CS folks on what direction should I take this product to, anyone here, willing to help me out? Happy to even pay for your time

I have recently been put in charge of Customer Success at a mid-size org that sells complex software/hardware in the healthcare industry and I'm trying to figure out how to build an actual CS function.

I have a team of Customer Success Managers currently floating between accounts, doing some proactive adoption/optimization work, but are mostly reactive based on escalations from Account Management and Customer Support. We have a number of customer-facing teams, including Sales, Account/Relationship Managers, Implementation Project Managers, Customer Trainers, Accounts Receivable, each responsible for a piece of the customer lifecycle, but I don't think anyone truly owns adoption, outcomes, retention, or the overall customer experience. We also don't have easily accessible metrics or usage data, nor do we have any handoff between Sales and Service. I also don't know who owns the renewal process.

So, my question is, from people that have been in my shoes before, where did you start or where do you wish you started? And are there resources out there that were really beneficial to you in learning about Customer Success frameworks and in general?

Any feedback is very appreciated!

I’ve been in the CSM/Account Management space for nearly a decade and I haven’t found a good way to maintain my inbox. I’ll stay on top of it for months at a time and then a bad/busy string of days and I’m looking at 300 emails to shift through.

Besides “inbox zero” method, what have yall found successful for good inbox hygiene?

My company gives me a development budget yearly and since everyone is pushing AI, I’m thinking of purchasing Claude Code. Wondering if it’s actually been useful for other CSMs?

I want to try and create some basic workflows - follow ups, summaries, notes, triggers, etc.

Done customer success for a year but mainly done SDR/BDR roles . Wanting to make CS a career. Where can I start ? Would love to learn much as I can as I have an interview this Friday