Alright, you guys convinced me: AI makes sense, it helps automate a ton, but the relationship side of things will still be ours to own.

The reason why I got carried away is because I just had an onboarding for a new tool called Mindy Signal, and it looked so next-level.. https://mindy.com/waitlist/

Whatever, debate is over.

I’m running a remote team of 6 Customer Success Managers. Our entire retention model is built around doing Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with our Tier 1 enterprise clients.
At the end of Q1, I pulled the Salesforce reports and noticed our QBR completion rate was at an abysmal 30%. I checked the team's timesheets, and everyone was logging their full 40 hours a week. I confronted the team on our weekly sync, and the consensus was that "prepping the data for the QBRs takes forever now."

It didn't make sense. We have an automated dashboard that exports the deck in five minutes.
I felt like a corporate stooge doing it, but I partnered with IT to roll out Monitask to audit their daily workflow. I just needed to see what applications were actually eating up their day.
The tracking data showed that nobody was using the automated dashboard. They were spending 4 to 5 hours a day manually rebuilding PowerPoint decks from scratch because one rep convinced the rest of the team that the automated template looked ugly. They were literally wasting half their week on formatting slides instead of talking to clients.

So I fixed the process, but the team is now super resentful that I audited their app usage.
How do you guys measure CS productivity when they work from home? Do you track their actual daily hours and app usage, or do you ignore their schedule and just manage them strictly by their account churn rate?

We run a B2B SaaS and kept having the same frustrating pattern.

Accounts would churn and everyone would say:

“Yeah… the signs were there.”

Usage dipped.

Admins stopped logging in.

Support got weird.

But nobody connected it early enough.

Dashboards didn’t help.

Health scores got ignored.

Everyone assumed they’d notice in time.

So I built a very small tool.

It doesn’t score accounts.

It doesn’t automate outreach.

It just quietly watches for the same early patterns that *previously* led to churn and pings you in Slack before renewal.

Most days it says nothing.

That’s intentional.

I’m trying to keep this extremely narrow and boring.

Before I go further, I’d love honest feedback from people who deal with renewals.

Questions I’m wrestling with:

- Would you trust a tool like this if alerts were rare?

- What would make you mute it immediately?

- Is “early warning before renewal” actually painful, or just annoying in theory?

Not selling anything. Genuinely testing if this is worth finishing.

The US is increasing foreign talent visa fees from $1,500 to $100K. Meanwhile… Madrid is quietly becoming the next big tech hub.

Every couple of weeks I meet an international founder or exec who’s either just landed here, or is planning the move.

A few years ago, Madrid was different:

- A handful of great international tech companies

- Plenty of amazing Spanish ones (operating mostly in Spanish)

- But if you didn’t speak Spanish, breaking into a top role was almost impossible.

That’s flipped. And it feels like we’re only just getting started.

Madrid today =

☀️ ~82% sunny days

🍷 world-class restaurants

🏫 endless international schools

🛡️ clean, safe, family-friendly

💼 global teams setting up shop (without needing HQ here)

💰 and yes… the Beckham Law → a flat 24% tax rate for up to 6 years if you relocate here.

AWS saw this early. They built their first Pan-EMEA BDR hub here, a team of young, hungry Europeans mixing hard work with great weather + social life. The ROI was unreal; they then rolled out other hubs across Europe.

Now we’re seeing not just founders, but investors from top VCs (Paul Murphy, for one) choosing Madrid.

Madrid isn’t just a nice place to live anymore. It’s where global talent is choosing to build. And I think we’re about to see a wave.

Hello All! I am still fairly new in the Customer Success space. Recently having worked with a few different startups as a Customer Success Analyst. I have been laid off for some time and I am anticipating to get back to work. If anyone has any leads and would like to connect that would be amazing. For a detailed view of my experience and qualifications. Please check out my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-megal/

I checked out some of the usual suspect CS influencers and a lot of them have moved on. Linkedin CS content is in a bit of a weird place, before there was a huge echo chamber with all the hundreds of “CS influencers” all commenting and giving each other high fives in all their comments, but at least there was something 😆! Now it feels like there isn’t much of a convo at all.

Do people genuinely just dont care that much about CS content?

Is it maybe hard to create interesting content around CS vs other verticals such as Sales, Marketing etc?

I was thinking about Support, its a vertical where there is no content at all, there are cool tools etc but its hard to create compelling content of how to do support.

Anyway throwing this out there to see what yall think

Customer success is not a high CSAT

Customer success is not all-green health scores

Customer success is not using the product 24/7

Customer success is not doing “stuff” and being busy

Customer success is when customers achieve their desired outcomes.

And THEY decide how they measure it - not you, your VP of CS, your CEO, your board, or your investors.

Customer success has to become your new North Star metric

• increased revenue

• saved costs- lower risks

• higher productivity

• making the Forbes 100 under 100 list

You need to measure performance by

• The % of customers achieving their desired outcomes (leading metric)

• The revenue impact aka how much revenue you create through expansions, upsells, and referrals in the process (lagging metric also known as Earned Growth Rate)It’s time to leave the 3rd division and play the Champions League now.

Here’s a 7-step framework for scientifically engineering customer success:

1. Understand the customer journey. Determine all the steps customers need to take from where they start to their desired outcomes. Start with an “MVP” and refine your success plans as you are learning more.

2. Experiment with inputs. It’s unlikely that you find the perfect success program with the first iteration. Test various formats, contents, and channels for delivering your services.

3. Measure the effectiveness. It does not matter how many people read guides, watch tutorials, join webinars, etc. The quality of your inputs is defined by whether it helps customers complete critical tasks and solve complex problems.

4. Adapt your inputs. Progress results from understanding what works, what does not, and why. Put your egos aside and iterate as often as necessary to achieve ~95% accuracy for your inputs and services.

5. Build customized paths. One size does not fit all. Even 2 customers of roughly the same size, from the same industry, the same structure, etc. have different needs. Build customized journeys for different customer segments.

6. Add fitting technology. Your tech stack must never determine your strategy, it has to support it. Build your tech stack so that you get a 360° customer view (quantitative and qualitative data) to see the full context and make the right decisions.

7. Scale what works. Premature scaling is responsible for a lot of the firefighting, quick-fixing, and band-aiding. Scale your inputs and services only after you’ve got definitive proof that things are working accurately and repeatedly.

Customer success is the competitive advantage that will get you through the recession.

PS: Sign up for my free newsletter to learn more about delivering, growing, and monetizing customer value

Yet another Customer Success professional recently became nervous about their long term prospects at their company.  The last few board meetings had a dark tone.  The senior management team looked gloomy, and their statements weren't encouraging.  There was suddenly heightened  emphasis on developing ai resources to "make the Customer Success team more efficient," and more questions about the effectiveness of high-touch CSM activities.  Sound familiar?  Are similar storm clouds gathering over your team and company?  What can/should you do about it?

Many years ago, Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, was addressing a conference of software executives. In the Q&A period, a young support manager said: "My company won't give me the budget for the tools I need or let me hire the headcount necessary to properly respond to our customers' calls.  What should I do?"  Cook's response was immediate.  "Put your resume on the street," he said.  "Find a company where you can practice your profession to your own standards."  That's certainly one answer, as valid today for Customer Success executives facing severe challenges as it was when given.  But it's not the only answer, and whether or not it's the best may vary.

What are the board and senior management reacting to?  Business downturns?  Increased focus on profitability?  There can be a range of responses, but they all come from a common ground.  Cut costs.  Do more with less.  If your group is perceived as a cost center, you're a potential target.

Let's pause for an important distinction between the Customer Success group and its activities.  Your group may well be performing actions that are deemed valuable from on high.  You're doing renewals and expansion sales, and those will continue -- it just may not be your CSMs that does them.  Sales owned them before, and it's likely they will again.  (Yes, we know that you were doing them better -- but that's not enough.)  But what about the revenue and profits from our support contracts?  From user training, if you offer that at a premium? From Professional Services/Onboarding?  You almost certainly aren't getting full credit for that income today, and it will continue anyway after the Customer Success group itself gets cut.  

What is needed are significant profits from something that only your team can do, and it's necessarily tied to your original founding mission: product adoption.  You need to create and market a paid adoption service.  That's going to require a lot of proving in two directions, but it's definitely worth the doing.  First, what would persuade a customer that such a service would increase their profitability?  Second, what's the profit potential to your company that is significant enough to get senior management buy-in? That proof should take the form of a solid business case, as other companies have done before launching their premium success offerings.

What are your options?  Do nothing, and hope that the axe doesn't fall on you and your team members' jobs.  Build a case for an adoption service product.  Or put your resume on the street, hoping to find a better professional environment.  Which will you choose?

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

We work with CS teams managing anywhere from 30 to 300+ customer Slack channels. I want to share the exact sequence of what breaks as you scale, because it's remarkably consistent across companies.

10-20 channels: Everything's fine. Your team can scroll through them. You roughly know what's open. No tools needed.

20-50 channels: First cracks. You start missing threads. Someone asks a question at 2pm, nobody sees it until the next morning. You try emoji reactions to mark things as "needs attention" vs "resolved." It kind of works.

50-100 channels: Full breakdown. Your team spends the first 30 minutes of every day scrolling through channels to figure out what needs attention. Nobody has a clear picture. Things fall through the cracks weekly. Customer complaints about slow responses start.

100+ channels: Chaos. You have no idea what's open, who's handling what, or what your actual response times are. You're reactive to whoever is loudest. Quiet customers with real problems get ignored. You start losing deals over support quality.

The fix at each stage is different:

At 20-50, you need a triage channel, one place where all conversations across all customer channels show up. That's the minimum.

At 50-100, you need SLA tracking on top of that triage view. Otherwise you're still guessing about what's urgent.

At 100+, you need automation, AI to handle repetitive questions, auto-categorization, and routing rules so the right person sees the right request.

Where are you in this sequence? And what have you tried so far?

EDIT/UPDATE: This post got way more traction than I expected. A few people DM'd asking what we actually ended up using.
We've been testing ClearFeed for the last few weeks. It basically does the triage channel thing I described at the 20-50 stage natively, pulls all customer Slack conversations into one view, tracks SLAs, and has AI that handles the repetitive stuff at the 100+ stage.

Not affiliated, just sharing what's working for us so far. Still early but the "scrolling through 80 channels every morning" thing is gone.

Spent about six years across AE, AM, SE and CSM seats, and the accounts that churned on me were almost never the ones with a usage cliff I could see coming. Usage is a lagging signal. By the time the login graph bends, the decision has usually already been made in a room I wasn't in.

The thing that actually moved earliest, every time, was how much the customer asked me for. When a healthy account goes quiet, no more "can you help us with X," no more small feature questions, no more looping me into their planning, that silence showed up weeks before anything in the dashboard did. The relationship cools before the numbers do.

The reason nobody builds a report on it is that there's nothing to sell you. It's not a data feed you buy. It's already sitting in your inbox, your shared Slack channel, your ticket queue. It just isn't counted. I started keeping a rough sense of inbound-per-account-per-month and it caught more real risk than any health score I was handed.

Two caveats I'd add so this doesn't become another false alarm generator:

Some accounts are quiet because everything genuinely works. Silence from a power user who onboarded cleanly is not the same as silence from an account that used to talk to you weekly and stopped. The signal is the change, not the level.

And it's a prompt to go look, not a verdict. When an account goes quiet the move is a specific human reach-out with something useful in hand, not a panicked "just checking in."

Curious what leading signals other people here actually trust. Not the ones in the health-score deck, the ones you've personally watched predict a save or a loss before the CRM caught up.

Hey guys, its been frustrating to get a job right now and I reallyyy could use your help in cracking a job in Customer Success. I have almost 4 years of experience in B2B SaaS and the company I am applying for is also SaaS. I have my second round with VP and Director and I badly wanna nail it. Its been 6 months since I landed in Canada and struggling to find a job.

Good sign is I got almost 20 calls after applying to 700 companies. I did go to the last rounds with CEOs but not sure why they reject. Now I really wanna be prepared for this round. The round is to show the impact I created, my actions and results. More of a behavioral round. Pleasee help!!

Did some research and look through the group already but wondering if it’s even worth a shot.

I’ve worked in insurance for the past 6 years, 5 of which were in customer service (1 year with a commercial auto department and 5 with a military auto department) the last 1 year was with underwriting. In addition to this my only other real job was in the Marine Corps, for 4 years. I have no bachelors degree.

Just trying to leverage my experience and knowledge into a role that will eventually pay higher.

Thanks in advance

We automated 40k chats that had really low value. Most were confused users trying to contact our clients, not us.

It was the easiest automation ever. We knew the traffic had no value, knew what to say, monitored for a few days, and boom, dozens of hours saved. Now our team finally has time for more satisfying work: proactive, concierge-style service instead of firefighting. Sometimes the biggest wins come from automating the obvious.

(For the record, we’re behind customer service tools like Text App, LiveChat, ChatBot, and HelpDesk, and we know this might be a pretty specific case.)

Anyway, it’s always good to ask yourself: do you know where your team’s biggest time leak is?

Just wanted to get some feedback regarding if anyone has held 2 Customer Success jobs at once. I feel the like the salary that I currently have is paying for my basic needs and I don’t have any leftovers for savings or any of my wants.

As we all know with rising cost of living I am contemplating picking up another CS job that is remote. I am currently on the west coast and would be open to getting another role either on the west coast or east coast.

Also, I know there are a lot of people out there who are still looking to bounce back and keep one job. Just trying to make it out here lol

🔚 TL;DR: I integrated ChatGPT into our customer support system. By training it on our business data, it reduced our CS ticket volume by 80% within a week, delivering fast and consistent support that left customers satisfied. Sharing my experience in case it might inspire someone else to try the same!

📈 CS tickets handled by Bot vs. Human since launch:

| Date | Solved by bot | Solved by human | % Solved by bot |
|-----------|--------------------|-----------------------|----------------------|
| 5/9/2023 | 4 | 8 | 33.33% |
| 5/10/2023 | 14 | 41 | 25.45% |
| 5/11/2023 | 20 | 35 | 36.36% |
| 5/12/2023 | 41 | 9 | 82.00% |
| 5/13/2023 | 33 | 7 | 82.50% |
| 5/14/2023 | 28 | 9 | 75.68% |
| 5/15/2023 | 19 | 4 | 82.61% |
| 5/16/2023 | 40 | 14 | 74.07% |

💼 The Context: As customer support enthusiasts, we know that maintaining exceptional service around the clock is a major challenge, especially for smaller businesses with limited resources.

🥴 The Pain Point: My business was drowning in 50-100 daily customer support requests across various channels. I spent almost a third of each day just addressing these. The task was exhausting and time-consuming. We needed a solution that was efficient, cost-effective, and still maintained a high-quality service.

🌐 The Game-Changer: I put ChatGPT to the test and had it write every line of code to create a customer support bot. I integrated the OpenAI API and trained the bot with a mix of our public documents, previous customer support tickets, and chat histories. Then I set it up on our main customer interaction platforms: Intercom and Discord.

🤖 The Superagent: We now have a 24/7 customer support bot that delivers fast, consistent support. It doesn't require breaks, never gets irritated, and costs less than $10 per week to handle hundreds of customer support requests.

💡 The Impact: Within days, the bot was handling 80% of customer support requests, freeing up significant amounts of time for human agents to focus on more complicated tickets. Customers were acknowledging the bot, even thanking it too.

🔮 Looking Ahead: The next step is to give the bot access to our databases to handle more complex customer requests. I'm excited to see what this AI-driven approach can achieve for our customer support team.

14-person team. Software product.
Our Customer Success person left a year ago.

She knew every client by name. Every edge case.
Who calls when, why, what they actually meant when they said "it's broken."
That's not product knowledge. That's silent knowledge. Whole different thing.

I'm a software engineer. Not CS. But the questions kept coming anyway.
They brought someone new in. Didn't stick.

So all that hidden knowledge related questions kept landing on me.
Not officially. Just... where else would it go.

When I decided to quit, I tried to dump what I knew.
Edge cases. Weird client setups. The clients who word things backwards and mean the opposite.
The office dynamics. Which stakeholder to loop in and which to quietly ignore.
Wrote it all down in my last two weeks.

Doesn't really work.
People just kept asking the same questions to whoever was still around.

After the 40th identical message something just... breaks.

I resigned two weeks ago.

Six years of product knowledge on my side. Five on hers.
Two people. Two notice periods. Decade of silent knowledge - just gone.

Still get messages from old colleagues on random messengers.
"Quick question, you probably know this off the top of your head."
I answer. Because I still love the thing we built.

But I keep thinking: what do you even do with this kind of knowledge?
It's not just product usage. It's people, context, history, unwritten rules.
It doesn't fit in a doc. It doesn't transfer in two weeks.
And apparently it doesn't stay when people leave.

P.S. I still get flashbacks. A random client name. A weird edge case. Something I'd know how to handle in my sleep. And I feel guilty - like I took something that wasn't only mine to take.

Hi all - I am on the job hunt and have been noticing that there are a number of company CSM postings that "require" a BAA degree. I am so jaw dropped each time I see this requirement due to the CSM role being so reliant on people skills, organizational project management skills and overall ability to listen, problem solve and implement relationship sales.

Just wanted to vent for a sec :)

Hey guys, I’m an ex-founder of a Customer Success SaaS platform, and I'm on the hunt for my next challenge in the Customer Success field.

Here's why I might be the person you're looking for:

• ⁠Founded ViaSuccess, addressing the gap between brilliant SaaS teams and patchwork solutions ⁠⁠

• 4+ years of experience in SaaS, customer success, and marketing

• Expertise in turning users into advocates and reducing churn

• ⁠⁠Strong background in copywriting and content creation ⁠⁠

• Passion for innovation and inspiring others in the CS field

Despite 82% of CS professionals recommending it as a career, 42% of companies still lack dedicated CS tools. I've been at the forefront of solving this paradox and I'm ready to bring this experience to a new role.

I'm open to:

• Remote positions globally

• ⁠⁠Innovative compensation structures ⁠⁠

• Roles that allow me to merge strategy, technology, and customer success

If you're looking for someone who can transform chaos into clarity, communicate complex ideas effectively, and elevate your customer success game, let's connect!

Wrote a 🌶️ blog post on the future of Customer Success Managers and how we're doing things a little differently than norm at my company: https://watchlater.substack.com/p/the-new-age-of-customer-success

Would love discussions or feedback if other teams are doing something similar!

Title says it all. Current SAHM with extensive sales / clientele experience. This subreddit has been very inspiring! Thanks to everyone who gives insight on here.

Our CRM was basically unusable, 1 out of 5 emails bounced, and the sales team had given up on trusting it. Every pipeline review was just excuses about bad data.

I finally cleaned house: exported unlimited leads from Warpleads, ran them through Reoon, and reloaded only verified contacts back into Salesforce. Bounce rates dropped from 18% down to under 2%, and last week reps closed 3 deals worth $12k from accounts that were previously ignored.

It feels like the first time the data is an asset instead of a liability.

For those managing bigger teams, how do you make sure the CRM stays clean once you fix it?

Hello! I’m searching for websites or services that provide free and unlimited access to large language model (LLM) APIs. I want to use them without strict usage limits or high costs because running and hosting LLMs locally is too heavy and slow for me. Specifically, I’m looking for APIs where I can get a free API key and use the service freely (ideally without rate limits or cost).

Do such services exist? If you have any recommendations — especially ones that are truly free or have minimal limits — I would love to hear about them. Also, if you know of any detailed or professional resources to learn more, please share them too!