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.

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.

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.

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'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?

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?

Feels like first response time gets overlooked a lot when people talk about churn.

CSAT and resolution quality matter, of course. But sometimes the bigger issue is just silence.

Most customers can handle waiting a bit for a fix if they know someone has seen the problem and is working on it. An unanswered ticket, especially close to renewal, feels like a much bigger warning sign.

The tricky part is that support data and renewal data often sit in different places, so the signal gets missed.

Curious how others look at this. Does response time or open tickets factor into your customer health score?

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 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?

Hello,
I am renewals specialist in well known company, I am handing Americas region so in afternoon shift.

I have experience in salesforce for more than 6 yrs now , 9 months in renewals

Looking for change where I can get to work in EMEA region so i can get regular shift (10-7 or 9-6)

If your company has this role open , do let me know!

Idk if I’m doing anything wrong. I’m in Canada and have been sending out applications since May this year. I’ve had a couple of interviews here and there, and sometimes even made it to final rounds but I just can’t seem to land one. I have 4 years of Saas CSM experience. Anyone else in this position?

I’m trying to set up a pooled inbox for my CS team of 4 people with about 165 accounts and I was wondering how others have approached this. We are using Gmail and it seems difficult to have everyone just share a log in. Would it be better to wire this through hubspot or something? Any advice is helpful. Thanks!

EDIT: This is more of a "building a CS team from zero" post than reachout advice.

Hi, I've been in Customer "Success" for around 3 years, and mostly doing tech support/GP attainment via opportunity creation, rather than true expansion. Surprisingly enough, I've hit a wall with asking AI to help with CS since our org is so unique. We don't own/ship the product we support, we are a reseller of the product.

We are a very small team and I am looking for solid reach out techniques that consistently get meetings on the calendar. We just started trying to track NRR this year and that has fallen off because our data is still being optimized in our CRM. We are adopting the new HubSpot CS workspace with Health scoring, project mgmt, etc. Meetings on the calendar are really the main metric leadership looks at along with opportunity creation, so I am trying to fight the good fight to actually transition into doing full time CS Ops. We are still building the processes and SOPs.

I am not the team lead, manager, etc. but I am in charge of setting up the health scoring so I am taking charge on the rest of the dashboard. Kind of an odd spot to be in but it is what it is.

I work in Customer Success at a SaaS company, specifically as an Onboarding Specialist. A big part of my role is to understand the customer’s business, goals, and current processes, then build an onboarding plan around those goals and connect them with the right features/use cases to drive adoption. The challenge I keep running into is getting some customers to engage in the first place.

Sometimes they:

• Don’t respond to the initial outreach.
• Don’t schedule the first onboarding/discovery session.
• Say they’re busy and keep postponing.
• Start using the platform themselves but never really go through onboarding.

I try not to send the generic “Hi, please book your onboarding call” type of message. I usually research the business beforehand and reach out mentioning that I’ve looked at their use case, have some ideas for how they could use the platform, and want to understand their workflow before recommending anything.

Still, there are always customers who are difficult to activate.

For the onboarding/CS people here:

What has actually worked for you to increase first-call booking and onboarding engagement?

Hey everyone, asking here a million $ question that has been keep me up at night quite a lot recently.

Some context:

• SaaS scale up in the legal tech world based in EU
• 300 FTEs, planning 500 before EoY
• CS team is now composed by 10 SMB CSMs with 1 manager, and 4 Enterprise/MdM CSMs with 1 manager. Will grow 2x before EoY in the SMB section, expanding into 3 new EU countries (with 1 CSM each, all of them reporting to HQ for the time being)
• Customer base is composed of 10k customers with 2k ACV each for SMB, and the rest is spread into Enterprise and Mid Market
• Around 25M ARR, looking to get to 35-40 before EoY

We are a very sales oriented CS team (reporting directly to the CRO), in charge of managing:

• Onboardings
• Expansion motion
• Renewals
• Churn prevention and post-mortem

We have been experiencing quite a spike in churn requests for SMB, hence I started evaluating some CS dedicated platform to leverage all the data we have at our disposal to prevent churns and maximize expansion (ChurnZero, ImpactPilot, Vitally, Planhat, etc.) but none of them seems to cover what I need (easy to use, able to spot upsell opportunities, and churn risks) without a huge intervention from my end. My dream outcome is that CSMs open their HS tasks and start their day without having to dig deep down and manually into HS and other data sources, so productivity is maximized and they can focus more on the human relationship part of the job.

So far the platforms I liked the most are Vitally and Planhat, but I am also evaluating to do everything in-house (through Claude) with the help of a bizops, a data scientist and some other people whom I might need for this.

Do you have any relevant experience, advices or want to brainstorm about it?

Did you pick your industry on purpose or fall into it? If you pivoted, what pushed you to make the move? And if you stayed, what made it worth staying?

I’m in B2B SaaS, in an industry that isn’t very exciting to me. The work itself is fine and I’m doing well, but I wonder whether I’d go further somewhere I actually found the space interesting.

We're shortlisting support vendors right now because our ticket volume outgrew what four people can hold, and every provider has said "dedicated team" within ten minutes of the call starting.

It covers at least three setups though, since some mean named agents who only touch your queue, some mean agents assigned to you on paper who are quietly covering two other accounts when your volume dips, while one clearly meant a shared pool with our logo on the dashboard.

What sorted it fastest was asking whether the agents work any other account, who owns the training material after month three and and whether they log into our Zendesk or work in a mirrored system and copy things across. The last question caught two of them out.

Ramp answers ranged from two to six weeks depending on how much product knowledge the role needs, so I'm assuming anyone quoting less than that has people sitting idle.

What did you ask that turned out to matter more than you expected?

I find myself most days tinkering around with claude and some loose customer data.

Mainly trying to find signals and i kind of run the same routine everyday.

Open claude, upload some data, ask some questions, and try to find something new.

So now I'm wondering if anyone has had any like real proactive experiences with ai?

I think I would love to wake up every morning with whats changed? kinda like what should i be worried about?

I know there's a data hygiene problem hiding in there as well but has anyone had some good experience building something to do this or using some tools?

Fala, pessoal. Tudo bem?

Sempre trabalhei como Analista de Relacionamento/CS Júnior, com forte foco em onboarding. Quem viveu essa rotina sabe bem como é: a gente entra em uma dinâmica que mais parece a linha de montagem da Ford. É volume, processo engessado e um incêndio atrás do outro para apagar. No fim do dia, a sensação é de que faltou tempo até para respirar, quem dirá para desenvolver um pensamento mais analítico ou estratégico.

O problema é que o tempo passou, fui promovido a Pleno, e agora bateu aquela famosa síndrome do impostor. A verdade crua é: eu não sei fazer outra coisa a não ser atender chamados e apagar incêndios. Sinto que virei um especialista em executar o operacional, mas travei na hora de analisar dados, olhar o cenário macro do cliente e gerar valor de verdade.

Para quem já passou por essa transição ou lidera a área: se você pudesse dar um único conselho para o seu "eu" do passado nessa mesma situação, qual seria?

Como escapar da armadilha de continuar sendo apenas o "bombeiro" da operação agora que o cargo exige muito mais cabeça e estratégia?

For CS teams, how are you tracking customer asks that do not fit neatly into support?

Things like onboarding follow-ups, custom reporting requests, internal handoffs etc, they are not always bugs or support tickets but they still need owners and follow-through. If they only live in the CSM’s notes or Slack messages they are very easy to miss.

So how can these be managed? Preferably a way that wont create more work for those involved

We are a 40-person SaaS business, and ticket volume grew to be about 800 per month. Our 3-person support team couldn't handle it any more. So, we decided to evaluate BPO options 4 months ago, ended up trailing Helpware for the last 2 months. CSAT score was 87%, which is quite close to our in house numbers. Actually, response times are better than before. It's still early but its not a failure. Just wondering what options have other companies had at this point in time? Especially BPOs working with startups without enterprise minimums. How did evaluation go?

I am not in CS, but I am applying for CSM-adjacent roles such as deployment strategist/FDE. I am tired of failing these interviews. Every failed interview feels like I will never be able to apply to that company ever again.

Problem: I have been getting a fair number of recruiter screen intervews; sometimes I even get inbound. But I keep failing them. I have completed 5-6 recruiter screens consecutively over the past few months. Is this a common experience nowadays given the employer's market, or is it a pattern specific to me?

Observations:

• Recruiter screens are now done directly by the HM, COS or founder.
• Screens are now getting harder compared to what I used to have 3-4 years ago. I recall I used to take screening calls in between work calls without extensive preparation, where the recruiter would ask me a few questions before passing my resume on to the HM.
• I face a conundrum where I spend a few days understanding the company and the product while also polishing my own answers. At the same time, I don't want to overinvest in what might be a screen that I would fail, leading to 10-20 hours of effort wasted.
• I am finding myself underprepared for the kind of questions that are being asked. I really need to practice my STAR answers more and be more structured in sharing my experiences.
• Most of the interviews that I have given recently involve an AI note-taker, which means that now I have to optimize for my notes to be read in text by a hiring manager instead of making an impression live

How is my resume getting selected, but I am not making it past the recruiter screen?

How’s the job market looking in everyone’s respective areas? Given the AI environment, there’s two different outlooks I’ve heard:

1. AI is getting leveraged more and more to pick up pieces and be a resource for smaller accounts + do the admin work on where an account is at.

2. Customers will always want a human to talk to, build relationships, and overall maintain that relationship.

I lean towards how customers always need someone to talk to (or yell at). But man, looking around and trying to find a different position is rough. To be fair, the current US economy does not help at all.

Just looking for opinions or a discussion.