7 challenges of a great Customer Success Manager
By: Kat Fisher
Tags: SaaS, Startup Lessons, Customer Success, Customer Service, Startup

Customer Success is one of the fastest growing professions in the last few years where the majority of people come to CS from various backgrounds versus being in CS from the start of their career. If you are looking to switch career paths and join CS, or whether you’re about to start a new CS role, here is a practical guide on how to thrive in this exciting but sometimes less understood profession, especially at the very start in a new role.

Let’s begin with the basics. So what is Customer Success in a nutshell?

My definition of it is this: The purpose of Customer Success is to help customers achieve their desired outcomes and drive continued value whilst providing them with best in class experience.

Right then, where from here?

Here are 7 challenges to tackle early on and lay foundations to become a great CSM.

1. Product Expertise

In order to be an effective CSM, it’s absolutely vital to have in-depth knowledge of the product to the best of your technical ability. This is a fundamental and basic requirement. In the eyes of your customers, CSM is the product expert who can teach them best practices, educate them about platform capabilities, solve problems around specific use cases and provide training or troubleshooting. The deeper you understand your software on the practical level, the more credible you’ll be as a Customer Success Manager to your clients.

From my experience, based on average product complexity, it’s possible to become a product expert within 3 months or so. Build strong relationships with Product Managers and technical teams as they will be your gateway to becoming a master of your company’s product.

2. Subject Expertise

An important part of the Customer Success role is to provide elements of consultancy and strategic advice to your customers. The customer’s expectation is now often not only to get benefits from using your product but also to receive an expert advice that is relevant to their industry.

In addition, it’s impossible for a CSM to provide true value through their work without in-depth understanding of their customers’ industries. For that you need to become a domain expert or, in other words, have the specific knowledge of the industry your product sits in. Whether it’s EdTech or MarTech, or Business Intelligence tool, you’d be expected to understand best practices, trends and general insights of those domains which are e-learning, marketing or data insights in this particular example. If you don’t bring subject expertise with your background, it’s important to get that education quickly and empower yourself with the expert knowledge you need in order to speak the same language to your customers.

3. Understanding Your Customers

Although each customer is unique, software companies normally have an overview of their buyer persona. It’s impossible to achieve Product Market Fit without understanding who your customers are and why they’d buy your product. This knowledge goes all the way back to the founders as they’ve contemplated creating your company’s product. Buyer persona or otherwise called Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) is another fundamental piece of knowledge a good CSM should possess. Normally, you should expect to dig into various sectors or segments based on the customer’s size, profile and use case for your product. Marketing & Sales team would be the go-to knowledge portals for this information. There has to be a solid feedback loop between all teams so that ICP information is accurate and relevant. The better you understand those frameworks, the faster you can tailor specific success plans and build valuable and strong relationships with your each unique customer.

4. Understanding Use Cases & Desired Outcomes

Use case is essentially why and how your customer is going to use the product.What is the problem they are trying to solve specifically and what is the outcome they are hoping for?

To give an example, let’s look at a Marketing CRM solution that does many things: capturing leads, creating contacts, sending emails, collecting data etc. One client bought this product because they want to send targeted emails to various customer segments. Another client wants to generate leads to go onto one giant mailing list. The first use case is targeted communication, the second is scaling the database.

CS approach for both use cases would be different as there will be different metrics to measure and different outcomes to track. Understanding nuances of different use cases is vital to connect the dots: Customer A / Use Case B / Success Plan C.

However, be mindful of putting customers into boxes. These are frameworks and templates to apply when working with unique customer’s case and help you identify their specific priorities, business goals and pain points.

5. Understanding Happy / Unhappy Paths

When it comes to actual experience your customers have with the product and service, it’s vital to understand common customer journey funnels for things to go well or for them to go off track. Borrowing from UI terminology, I’d call it a Happy Path and an Unhappy Path. When a customer churns, there is usually a series of events and signals that led to that point. You need to understand those signals and factors that triggered it and how to prevent this in future. Normally these are a lack of education, mismatched product expectations, issues with product performance and so on. This knowledge should sit within Customer Success organisation and shared with Sales and Product to correct those tracks and prevent customers from sliding into unhappy paths.

6. Metrics

To repeat a well known phrase, what can not be measured can not be managed. What can not be managed, can not be improved. In order to be a successful CSM, you need to have a great understanding of KPIs and metrics for you, your team and your company. This will guide your work to deliver a real impact and provide a meaningful connection between your day to day tasks and your company’s top goals and targets, and ultimately give you the job satisfaction we all want in our working lives. CS metrics normally focus on Churn, Retention, Expansion, Customer Satisfaction and NPS. Get clarity on the key metrics that are important for your CS team and you individually. Working without clear targets is like travelling to an unknown place without a map — it can be a fun idea but it could lead to disastrous results.

7. Prioritisation

Finally, I’d call this challenge Spinning The Plates. No matter how many customers a CSM has to manage, there is always, always the challenge of prioritisation. What task to tackle first, what email to answer, what project to focus on to ensure that the core purpose of CS — to drive value, retrain customers and grow the revenue — is delivered through your work. It takes time to build that confidence on where to spend your time on to align all pieces of the puzzle. Ultimately, it does come from a deep understanding of your customers, their use cases and outcomes, the signals for a happy / unhappy journey and how you apply your communication and operational skills to that. Building that knowledge fast will allow you to navigate through the complex system of tasks and ultimately work smart.

There are other CS challenges such as how to use data to extract actionable insights, how to understand and prevent churn, how to drive adoption and expansion — the list continues.

These are the starter challenges to focus in the first 3 months or so in a new role in order to build the foundation of becoming a great Customer Success Manager for your company.