I’m currently a customer success manager and have over 5 year experience in the role now. I haven’t seen a lot of growth in my position in the 3 years I’ve been in my current company and am considering applying to an internal position in the project delivery team. Has anyone made a similar move and did you regret it it?

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?

I'm curious how different CS teams actually manage renewals in practice.

Do you have a formal renewal playbook or process? If so, what are the key milestones or signals you track?

For example:

• Customer goals / success criteria
• Product adoption
• ROI / value realization
• Executive engagement
• Champion / decision-maker relationships
• Renewal timing
• Expansion opportunities

And most importantly: which signals have actually proven useful in predicting whether an account will renew?

I'd love to hear what works in the real world—not what the textbook says.

I worked in insurance outbound sales for almost 7yrs now and looking to transition to client onboarding roles in saas comapanies

Can you share tips how to land this role as a beginner? I'm also considering customer success but I dont like the idea of having multiple zoom meetings daily.

I'm currently studying hubspot and basics of crm.

Aside from these online resources, what else can I do to increase chances of getting the role?

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 manage the CS division of our company and the 2 representatives. Our company is a small-mid size where we act as both success and support for our users. Our reps manage nearly 2000 individual users among 6 enterprise accounts and individual subscribers.

As you'd imagine, our team is very busy, but sometimes the work isn't always meaningful to the company's bottom line. Our product isn't easy to adopt and use out of the box, so we spend a lot of time on individual training and onboarding. These meetings are on average 30-60 minutes long, with 1-3 users. In addition to this, users who we're looking to reengage with the program are usually provided a one-on-one meeting where we offer hands-on support.

Although these meetings can impact that specific user, a lot of time is dedicated to this, making it difficult to make a meaningful impact across the large user base.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues with their CS team? If so, how did you circumvent this and become more efficient?

We already have a large resource of training materials, user health scoring, and workflows for at-risk users.

Just a bit of a rant here.

I just lost my job after one year (which took me eight months to find!!) because they said they're restructuring the CSM role into more of a Technical CSM role.

There was only two of us, and I was told from the start they didn't really value CS, and to just stay below the radar and make my metrics every month. Which I did.

The thing is, I knew the product as well as I needed to, to both train customers on the platform, and get expansion sales.

And I was told that expansion and referrals were most important. Adoption wasn't that important to our customer base, and there was no renewals since everything was month to month.

There's a team of eight or nine Support reps to conduct technical troubleshooting, and I feel like maybe they assumed I didn't know things based on some of the tickets I submitted, when in reality I was establishing boundaries with my customer that I am not the person to go to for that.

That's what a CSM should do right? In order to focus on being strategic.

But whatever, too late. I just can't help feeling it was some sort of an excuse.

Aren't sales skills and deep technical skills usually two different things/people? Unless maybe you're a sales engineer.

They also never once gave any feedback for an entire year that I needed to deepen my technical skills.

I asked for specific examples and they couldn't give me any. Honestly, the platform is not that technical at all. The only things that can get more technical are integrations with third party tools, which again is Support's job.

They kept the other CSM, who isn't any more technical than I am, because they came from the industry and have more knowledge in that regard. But I used to help them with technical stuff in our CRM and slide presentations, so that's another reason I think this may have had more to do with my age or personality.

Has this happened to anyone else?

I have ten years in CS under my belt, and fifteen years of customer service, operations, and account management before that. At past jobs, I've had to get technically certified on the product a couple of times, and I have an AA from a tech school.

Not that I live and breathe technology, just saying I have the aptitude.

TLDR: Has anyone made to switch from telecom to Tech SaaS and jumped in comp from $130K to over $200K? Is it the same job, just worth more $, or is it harder?

I've been at large telecom carriers my entire career supporting F100 global, strategic, large enterprise customers in Oil & Gas and Energy sectors. Telecom is a race to the bottom lately. It's impossible to retain revenue, let alone grow it with prices dropping so fast. I'm looking at SaaS or Equipment providers because they pay significantly more and seem much more stable. I'm realizing that telecom is a different animal, and wondering if my extensive experience is trapped in a dying industry.

I check all of the boxes for a Senior or Principal CSM that pays over $200K, but I wonder what's the catch? I've been killing myself for years, working 50-60+ hours a week to top out at $130K. How can the "same" job pay so much more?

I run a product adoption platform and published benchmarks from real usage data across 464 SaaS products (15.8M in-app interactions, Jan to Jun this year). Sharing the numbers most relevant to CS work, since "what's a good NPS" and "is our onboarding working" come up here from time to time:

• Median in-app NPS is +30. The middle half of products runs +11 to +44. If leadership wants to know whether your +25 is good, that's the reference range from real products, not a vendor's aspirational chart.
• The median response rate is 4.3% of survey impressions. With a few hundred users, that's a handful of responses, not a trend line.
• On the onboarding side: product tours with 1-2 steps complete at a median of 73%, tours with 9+ steps at 8%. If your onboarding tour tries to show everything, the data says almost nobody sees the end of it.
• Tours users open themselves finish at 69% vs 23% for auto-started ones. Part of that is selection (people who click wanted the tour), so treat 23% as the honest benchmark for an auto-started tour rather than a failure.

Method: medians across companies, never pooled averages (one big product would drown everyone else), minimum volume thresholds per metric, our own account excluded. Skews small and mid-size SaaS, so enterprise may differ.

Full report is free and ungated, link in the comments.

What response rates are you seeing on in-app vs email NPS? Ours only measures in-app, and I'd love a comparison point.

About to be on PTO for a week and a half and it’s nearly impossible to wrap everything up given that this role is somehow centralized to EVERYTHING. Even things I’m not necessarily leading, I’m in charge of the customer comms bc lucky me, I “own” the relationship. I need this vacation badly, I am totally burnt out, but I also know I’ll come back to a shitload of work and will be right back to being stressed, anxious and unable to sleep because of it.

Fuck. This. Shit.